9th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Jackie White
Jackie White has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. She is an associate editor for RHINO magazine and has also been a featured reader at Printers Row Book Fair, the Guild Complex, and Woman Made Gallery. Her poems have most recently appeared in Folio, Quarter After Eight, and Mid-American Poetry Review. She has poems and translations are forthcoming from The New Translation, So to Speak, and BlueSky Review.


Under the Laws of Motion

It is like this:

the cusp of evening, a man
shows up at the door and
instinct draws the hand
forward, and you open, I
opened it. The door that
opens closes. A world

happens inside a room
when the body that entered
meets the hand that opened,
the hand moves along
the body, the body
of space between them closes.

It is the nature of bodies to
keep moving, doors open
and close as the earth goes
on spinning and you can't
keep the moon out of
poems. Inside the room,

a lamp glows. You begin
asking, what is the moon for?
You know you can turn
off the lamp. Inside
the house many doors lead
to other rooms; inside one

a man and a woman keep
an old story between them,
somebody leaving. Outside
another world happens.
It could be like this:
leaves rustle against dawn,
or footsteps...

-- Jackie White

© 2003 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.