Fury Psalm 7
art by Alyssa Blankenship
by Jackie White
For longer than I imagined, the dark has throttled me
come from the grave of my mama’s belly into this imaginary we.
Let bedtime be a time for rest and not needle
the temple with blood-scratched phonography.
Let the pillow case be placed on the pillow again.
Let the cool side soothe and not spread with threat
For I am an orphan with two death masks on the mantel,
While Anne says, Praise, praise the weeds
for a touch can uproot them though they ring the yew tree
and I don’t know how to accept her not there,
To believe I am guilty of nothing? as I lay me down
Mercurial. Praise dusk for the set table, clean
Dishes, evening news. Bless the night, nightly
though I see her voice, a dark funnel, black and leafy
And the moon with a dozen lead sinkers round my neck.
Praise the stars we die into. Rejoice for the silence
Of marble, her in a boundary of wood. Under the watch
Of a tame or savage God, who delivers the elegiac,
the separated travel in sleep, backwards into the dark.
Jackie K. White earned her PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) and was a Professor of English, now Professor Emerita, at Lewis University. She is the author of three chapbooks—Bestiary Charming, 2006 Anabiosis Press Award; Petal Tearing & Variations, Finishing Line (2008); and Come Clearing, Dancing Girl Press, 2012—and her poems and translations have appeared in ACM, Bayou, Fifth Wednesday, Folio, Spoon River, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Her chapbook of collaborative poems, with Simone Muench, Hex & Howl (2021) and their full-length collection The Under Hum (2024) were published by Black Lawrence Press. Jackie has also served as an editor for RHINO and is now a consultant for Jet Fuel Review. A native of Illinois, she currently resides in Colorado.
Alyssa Blankenship is a working artist who uses surrealism to engage with themes of transformation, escapism, and resurrection through the lenses of both naturalistic and manmade decay. Her literary work has been published in Burningword Literary Journal, Camas Magazine, Bardics Anonymous, Ponder Review, Fish Girl Collective, Folklore Review, Slipstream, The Gorko Gazette, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
