Poetry by Jessica Covil-Manset

             ​Paulo César León Palacios CC




​Foster Family Keeps Us for a Night

I remember a house so big 
I kept exclaiming about it.
Ceiling so high, like a church.
I sang praises until my sister's eyes
said I’d told too much. 
 
The faces are lost to me-
not clouded over like in dreams,
but cut off at the neck; 
not on screen even.
Like that beautiful lady in the Powerpuff Girls,
or the grown-ups in Cow and Chicken.
 
I must not have been looking up
except at the ceiling.
My sister and I, 
so focused on not being a burden,
couldn't tell the mother 
what we wanted for breakfast.
The pantries had all been empty
when CPS came to get us.
 
So she took us to the store with her,
walking slow and smiling 
through snack aisles-
her young daughter in the cart 
more prone to speaking:
pointing and receiving. 
The mother kindly awaiting signs,
following me and my sister's eyes,
listening and selecting.
 
We woke up the next day
to a feast. The mother said
our dad was on his way-
in the meantime, eggs whichever way,
but we didn't specify.
 
And we never saw them again,
but I think about them often.




​
seeking sanctuary

hide me in whatever private pocket
you can find;
let it be just me there,
protected from the outside.
keep me              warm                   safe
close by-
as close as it is possible
to be.
i am searching for 
some way, some circumstance
where i am possible 
to be.
in whatever private pocket,
hide me, hide me


​

Jessica Covil-Manset is an English PhD Candidate at Duke, where she is writing a dissertation on poetry and poeisis as political praxis. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, Whale Road Review, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere, and she was nominated for the 2020 Best of the Net.

---