Jordan Cobb

In Our First Lives

My sister is telling me her plans to plant

a willow tree in the yard in the new house in Kentucky—

a state I thought we had both escaped—so, to distract myself,               

I point out the gap in the chainlink,

the dog rushing towards it.

Watch her call its name.

The dog is the ex-husband's,            

like the baby, the tax returns, the divorce.

The legal fees & split seams of her dignity.

But the fence & the beyond, the dragonfly above

the late September creek,           

none have been touched by him.

She’s out past the cemetery,

the barbershop, just over the county line

from our parents in the yellow house

with their Sunday dinners & walks down Main Street,

complaining about the new builds near the Methodist church

making traffic worse.

Nearly October, so she packs us

into the old Subaru for a ride up 65. Says there’s a farm

with a pumpkin patch ripe for picking & a barn

with an attic of antiques foraged from quieter places.

We play I-Spy, spotting butterflies as we drive.

Haven’t seen this many in years,

not since the forests out in Arkansas, the days of fairy walks

& nights of witches hunts, long before the affair

led us here. & in the middle of it, the dim light

of newborn scents, the creaking rocking chair.

Caught below the bluegrass haze

& time gets split like hairs. I want to tell her I can see her god

hanging low in the stratosphere, his tongue thick

as he licks the condensation from the water tower

until the interstate is clean.

Later, when we’re in the backyard again,

finishing up power washing the brick, we spot the bats

that live behind her shutters flying back into the black.

My sister turns to me,

asking what she should do about them—

all that darkness & wrinkled wings. 

But I don’t have an answer to what she’s looking for—

how to make this place a home.

Land’s End

Poppies, spotted from the trail;                         hummingbirds & man made stairs. 

Breeze in from the west tonight,     no salt to scent the edges. Super blue moon

two days past                          & the sky,              half open or empty.

Call it golden,       this hour, this bridge, alive in its glory,                           

& across the bay,                                     the lighthouse, the steady pulse of warning.

A short list of unnatural heartbeats I have known in my lifetime:

companies in a court of law;            

the cells that lived inside my body                    before I willed them out;                                     

the last prayer I tried           that April night–                 

cut my tongue so deep,      I can't say when I stopped the bleeding.

Can’t find the rusted knife out here.               The vodka, the twin bed.  The nightmares.

No ghosts left to hide         in their barren tableaus.

Before, there was a time I came to cliffs like this–      hurled insults onto the overpass, overhead,                  

but here, it’s passing conversations along the evening mist,     barks from the unleashed dog,

flies & old horse shit.

It doesn’t hurt in the old way anymore,

but I remember the pain the same.

I think I am in love again.

I think I am afraid again.

Sleep & death in the same breath.  

What is a soul

but the secrets I was willing to tell?

& if I never cross the bridge to the lighthouse,

or learn the names of the trees growing around me,

or the anger still living inside me?

Below, rolling fog. The coast guard, the last ship left,                beating against the waves

at the mouth of the cove.                    & I, cliffside, hands cupped to my lips

calling out for an answer,                   like screaming into snow.

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Jordan Cobb (she/her) is a queer American poet. Based in NYC, she completed her MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in The Shore, jmww, The Storms Journal, Rise Up Review, Jet Fuel Review, Camas Magazine, Outskirts Literary Journal, Cherry Tree, & Fugue Journal.