Jessica Barksdale
Jessica Barksdale has published three poetry collections: When We Almost Drowned (2019), Grim Honey (2021), and Let’s End This Now (2024). She taught at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and continues to teach for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in Vancouver, Washington.
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Let’s Tip Things Over
Like a marriage, the splat
of a divorce on concrete.
Like those wasted hopes
and dreams, all cracked.
Like the Sunday night
awards banquet, we on
the platform, gold medals
in hand, then tossed. Like
the fancy pantry. Let’s
shake the shelves,
break the glass, let
the crystal crash,
a timpani of despair.
Let us not answer
the phones or pay
the bills. Let the work
pile in the house
in smoking pyres. Forget
our parents, our
children, our friends,
our work, our passions.
Ignore the lawn,
the animals, the
tree branches bashing
against the roof.
Let’ s turn up the heat,
broiling the skin of happiness.
Let’s singe and foment
and stir, cackling as we
do. Let us tear off our
garments, wet from
repeated drownings.
Let us curse and shriek,
yell and cavort over
the bones of our dead,
over the bones of
our lives. Feel this,
if nothing else. A tabletop
edge in your hands,
playing cards neatly
arrayed. Tilt, lift, flip
with every muscle.
Laugh, oh, laugh.
Feel the wild ride of the
smash to earth, the wrack
and ruin. Burn, we sing,
burn it all to cinders,
to sand, to air, nothing
but joy and breath, capacious,
overwhelming, glorious.
Escalatory
To increase, as in a fight, one
that starts about toothpaste
and ends up being about the crack
in the center of true love, about
loss, the sadness that another
person is never enough to fill
the expanse. To expand, to enlarge,
to burgeon, mushroom, like a bomb,
like a dark cloud looming over
the rest of our lives, gaining, lifting,
spreading, snowballing. But
then what about an escalator, one
at a shopping mall now long-gone
but then thriving. What about going
up and up and up, the next level
the place where the precise, perfect
thing lives in a small box or is displayed
in a store window. Feel the swell of hope
as we climb, a spreading of our hearts,
nothing close to a fight or existential
dread. This escalation will not deescalate.
Nothing to stop. Think proliferate,
like joy. Think gain as in a salary
raise. Think rise and rise again,
hope and hope, oh yes, yes. This
is all going to work out just fine.
