Two Poems by Jessica Goodfellow
Glass Piano
Alexandria of Bavaria,
believing she’d swallowed a glass piano,
moved carefully through the world,
even in doorways turning sideways
so as not to shatter it.
My father, my neighbor, crabwalk
through the world in whatever way they must
so as not to pierce the things they believe
inside themselves. Perhaps I do it too—
it’s hard to see in a glassless mirror
of cloudy steel plate screwed to cinder
block wall, a prison cell mirror—
the crow’s one note. All of us forget gravity
is our friend. It holds us here, together,
on this one planet. Lets us fall. Shatter. Remain.
First
The first ever rug was possibly Egyptian,
a cat-shaped rug made of cat hair,
meta meta meta-floor.
The first poem ever was likely poem-shaped,
and made of other poems, which is impossible,
which is poetry.
That the first mother Eve/r was mother-shaped but
made of Adam’s rib tells us that the very first fruit
must have been bitter,
also imaginary. The first dragonfly was shaped
about the same as today’s dragonfly, a lesson
we keep on learning to forget.
First kiss, first car, patent office—why do we
fetishize the firsts, when there were lilies long
before trumpets, weren’t there?
And you, my firstborn, my inceptive orchard,
my original orrery, be good to my second born—
he is your first sibling, first after you,
as everything is first, if you look hard enough.
Putting a wafer on each tongue, even death comes
one by one, each last first.
*
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (2015), and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (2014). A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in Verse Daily, Motionpoems, Scientific American, and Best American Poetry 2018.
