Moon Jar

Poems

Didi Jackson

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781597098175
• eBook ISBN: 9781597098182
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

This debut poetry collection "gives poignant testimony to the sorrow, rage, and piercing clarity of grief"—an Alice James Book Award finalist (Tracy K. Smith).
In her intimately compelling debut collection Moon Jar, Didi Jackson explores the life-altering and heart-rending loss of her husband to suicide. While grief never fully subsides, Jackson allows herself to rediscover love as she contends with the haunting grip of human trauma. With precision and grace, these affirmative poems exhibit an admirable devotion to self-healing that is metamorphic and cathartic.
Turning to biblical narratives as well as seminal works of art by the likes of Hildegard of Bingen, Pablo Picasso, Sappho, Mark Rothko, Kazimir Malevich, Hieronymus Bosch, and Frédéric Chopin, Jackson orchestrates a tableau of conversations around human suffering, the natural world, and impermanence. And like the Korean porcelain moon jar, these poems mark and celebrate the imperfection of existence.

I
Your Husband Was a City in a Country of Sorrow

In my body the memories were lodged. This writing is a dim bulb on a black cord in the examiner’s room.

I prefer you do not attempt to read it. I cannot help but feel responsible for your discomfort. So as you read, you will feel me tugging it from your hands.

—Toi Derricotte

I’m never finished answering the dead.

—Li-Young Lee

Almost Animal

after Käthe Kollwitz

I heard they no longer sew eyelids of the dead shut.

At the morgue, I busied myself counting

the lacerations on my husband’s neck and wrists.

I wore sunglasses and a light jacket

and pressed my palm to his wrapped chest.

After the dried blood was wiped from his face, his jaw was set

with a piece of string. They tried to leave a natural appearance.

I wanted to smooth his clothes; I wanted to clean his hair.

His throat was a village, my palm an iron of matrimony.

I wanted to burn the holding room, jar and sell the ashes.

At home, the hours layered like moths.

I didn’t eat and slept some nights. This was my way

of waging war. There was nothing left for me.

I carried him on my back and over my shoulders. I carried him

across my forehead and between my shins.

But it didn’t matter; he was going right into the fire.

I should have been the one to have prepared his body.

kill lies all

After his death,

my hair did not grow,

my nails peeled and flaked,

my bones were lifted into a sack

upon my legs. Even my muscles

decayed from the lack

of wild oranges and sweet tea.

This was the new myth of my life.

When visiting Spain, a cricket was loose

in my kitchen, its chirp was

like my name, like the words yes, yes.

But what could a dead woman know

of yes? That summer, one cricket

became two, two became four.

It was then I memorized

the trill and grind of my name.

Like a vandal with a can of red spray paint,

I could scrawl the words kill lies all

across my Guernica. Who will

be the bull, the horse? Who

the severed head and arm?

Under the bald lamp, like an eye,

I will expose old scars and breast-feed

a shadow of myself.

Killing Jar

There are days

I go to the mailbox

and find letters

from my dead husband

translating for me his suicide:

the cold blade softened into cursive,

his fear licked onto the stamp,

as the return address: the date of his death.

I look forward to these letters.

Some are addressed to my son,

I collect and keep those.

At times this is a greedy act,

but he is too young.

I see my body asleep in my son’s body,

my eyes behind his eyes.

But now I worry that there is distortion

like Parmigianino’s Self Portrait

in a Convex Mirror, his hand

slightly reaches out to me,

slightly curls back into itself.

When I was a girl, my uncle

mailed to me framed collections

of mounted butterflies.

Blue morpho. Tigerwing.

Malachite. Moon Satyr.

These are all names my husband

could take now. I imagine him

as Goldman’s Euselasia

or the Great Eurybia.

I know that to kill a butterfly,

you use a killing jar.

Because they are so fragile,

sometimes butterflies batter

themselves in the killing jar.

At night, this makes me wonder

about the mixing

spoons in the bowl,

the tangles of the dough

such small, temporary fights.

For a clean kill, it is better

to first stun a butterfly

by pinching its thorax.

But you must practice to get

this method right,

so it is recommended to try

it on common moths or butterflies

you are not concerned about.

Pinch smartly between your finger

and thumb like tweezing a piece of sky.

Honing

A sharp knife is a safe knife.

There is a difference between honing a knife

and sharpening it. The metal rod that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Signs for the Living
• I Your Husband Was a City in a Country of Sorrow
• II Another city will be found, better than this.
• III Eternal City
• Acknowledgments
• Biographical Note