Please Do Not Let This Be Routine
Three Poems by Sierra Jacob
Please Do Not Let This Be Routine
Evening goes quietly it does not coax [ I track glow from light bodied clouds ] because clouds have left this [ I track stretch of foothilled sky ]. For a while now wishing away [ I track dark of cleft rain ] now dust only has itself to [ I track tarnish and fall over ] on all the surfaces touched over. Not in flux it is [ I track long consideration over how heat will continue to press itself against ]. How it flattens [ I track yearning up of plants ]. Please do not let this be routine. Yes the names of these places hold such a history or [ I track borrowed land feature ] but what has already passed to change. The east entrance once scattered with human bones [ I track such white unfurling ] to mark a threshold. I’d like to believe that [ I track growing dark set the bone fields like the coruscate of bunch grass ]. This is a claiming. This intersection of five valleys renamed the place of freezing [ I track place of cold liquid ]. The place of place in this place. The name an occupation of what once was. [ I track peaks bowing into snow ] and the black bears coming down from deep hills consume mountain apples now [ I track littered in still summered sun ]. And if I am telling you the first names the place names the names of things it is not to show you anything but to orient myself in landscape built for something else. [ I track these rivers turning out ]. Again call this all [ I track a claiming ]. Call the world enough until I can articulate a body out of so much open space.
I Must Tell You
In Reading This
SIERRA JACOB is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana, where she received the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship for poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Sonora Review, Yemassee, Cream City Review, and Pacifica Literary Review, among others. She was born and raised in Ha`iku, Hawai`i.
Photo Credits: George N. Barnard, photographer (American, 1819–1902), Battle Ground of Resacca, Georgia, 1866. Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
SUPPORT INDEPENDENT LIT. If you liked this post, please share it & “follow” us for a free online subscription to LiGHT/WATER.
These poems were published in LiGHT/WATER i — you can buy a print copy here for $5.
