Poetry by Jessica Dubey

     Vincent Parsons CC




The First Time Back to Religious Ed


I leaned into the boy                next to me 
                             said        my dad            is dead

  I know              he said                  we’ve been praying
               for you        
                                           or maybe
                             he said    
                                                          we’ve been praying
               for him
    
                             what good             
                                                         would that do 

                      head           split open
                    
                              yolk for brains    

                  yellow-white       bleeding     together    
                    
                                            impossible 

                     to put back               in the shell

            
                   For Easter grandma didn’t boil 
                                                               her eggs
                                                               she dyed 
                                                               them

                                 left them raw
                                                                            pricked
                               a hole in each end

                                             turned the needle
                                             scrambled it

                 brought it to her lips    

                                                             I swear

                                                looked like she was about to
               whisper a secret
                                           before she blew 
                                                               into one end 
                         
                                                                                         blew
                                       the insides clean out
                              to stop the rot             before it began

                              kept                      forever
                                           beautiful 

                     She said
                              when the pathologist opened 
                                                                             Dad up

               he was shocked to find
                             three kidneys

                                                     like cracking an egg
        and expecting yolk

                            but finding a live
                                                      chicken instead

                




Second-hand Fire
 
If you are crawling on the floor 
in a darkness that collapses 
your lungs, feeling for the fire escape, 
it might be too late. 
The fire wants to make a game of it, 
but like a casino the house always wins. 
And because the house has married the fire, 
everything is house and everything is fire.
As a child I had a babysitter who lost half her family 
to flames. It was a summer evening so hot
and dry the air was just waiting 
for an excuse to ignite.
Ten years later to the day 
it came back looking for her. 
When she told me her story 
it was tag you’re it--
the threat leapt onto me,
a second-hand anxiety,
and the game I never wanted to play began.
Once I almost left my children 
in a house that wanted to burn. 
I went back and sniffed it out 
like a game of hide and seek. 
The fireman said he never questioned
a woman’s sense of smell. 
I questioned why the fire had taken
so long to find me. 






Provinces of Gray

“we live in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds…”
                                           Donald Hall

There isn’t enough magenta in my garden, blues 
are rarer still. This isn’t about color, but I’ll be 
damned if it doesn’t feel that way. The poet 
who lost his wife wrote there was no color 
in his world, only gray. If black is the absence 
of light and gray is a shade of black, then
gray is my garden. I sow and reap
seasons of absence. Loss dulls 
the landscape. It has a shape, 
a weight to it. It wanders in at night, beds 
itself down in the day lilies.



​

Jessica Dubey is the author of the poetry chapbooks All Those Years Underwater and For Dear Life. She’s been nominated for a Best of the Net and her work has appeared in such journals as Stone Canoe, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal and Kissing Dynamite.