Buffalo Girl
for Triệu Thị Trinh
History makes little bundles out
of the unthinkable
young boys carve
three-foot breasts
to keep your story otherworldly and
ridiculous; a crisp blade slips
from view We stand
at the Albertson’s Customer
Service and I hold my
breath as you ready a
well-worn trap
discount oversight:
grave mistake
A set of eyes
exhaust and I
almost feel for
our opposing force who does not
know the survival of ants
under glass ::
long after your death you haunted
soldiers’ dreams the Chinese
Commander that slayed you built
fallacies to try and keep you
still
Poor men and their
fantasies of time and blood
that pass only during the duration of war
Victory painted the
parking lot lucky-red
In every windshield I swear I saw
the glint of a slow storm
in your eyes
history books are forever
missing the details of unfathomable
loss— providing discounts
on over-stocked goods You are my
mother —minor warrior— who has
never needed saving who has
never needed memory to make
a home (a good home) alone
in the woods
Kleptomania V: To Know and Laugh at the New Country
Hands spending, hands
undid and undoing a clock
with no hands that thumb
a way through hangers,
that switch the tags, that
strangers pockets, that reject
the terms of protection.
We cannot know what
you cannot hold and here,
for you: a perfect
peach in the palm of my
hand. Let it disappear
you. Have it hunger
across still-bent
bodies in
repose: one muddy
river to another.
And look: a wasp, the
taste of Big Macs and
nuclear-red Twizzlers—
our mouths savoring air.
Four firm wheels and
traffic lights, drive-thrus
and dirty dancing.
I said look:
it was worth it
for a time.
Poem in Which I Narrowly Escape My Birth
Do you ever feel like flesh? I do.
Bleached poem about the
broken jade bracelet my
mom hid in the front of
her underpants on a
helicopter for which
she bartered a fairy
tale. USA #1 on the skip
track, saying here we go ‘round
the mulberry bush babe stick
it around your fat, white
wrists until it cracks. Bright-
light-waisted fingers, the
same size, but it’s all different
now, she sd, it’s all gone.
Smoothed down panic
with a memory
that was never there to
begin with: some clean
country of arrivals and plenitude,
some fluent daughter’s palm
to place seedlings and
transpiration.
And the story about the dead-
faced sergeant doesn’t need a
translation. Hell, it doesn’t
even need words. Mama:
know a traveling girl with
a basket never keeps the
bread or the wine. She
loses talons for a time and
forgets the image of her
grandmother’s face.
Keep it on your person,
keep it forever under
gauze, keep it safe in the
brick of wet banana leaf-
loss, find me, gone too,
for you.
Somewhere between
the dead sergeant’s deed
and the sea.
JESSICA Q. STARK is a poet and educator living in Jacksonville, Florida. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020 and was named one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2020" in the Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including most recently INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Society of America, wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, Glass Poetry Journal, and others. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI and the Comics Editor for Honey Literary. She teaches writing at the University of North Florida.