Jessica Barksdale
Grim Honey
by Jessica Barksdale
Winner of the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Manuscript Contest
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Jessica Barksdale’s sixteenth novel What the Moon Did was published February 2023 by Flexible Press. Her short story collection Trick of the Porch Light was published September 2023. She’s 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.
Whipped
It was important to be unconscious during
major holidays, the homemade eggnog
(my alcoholic grandmother’s recipe) providing
only a tiny nod to dairy. First bourbon, brandy,
and finally whole milk. Cream. Whipped
egg whites, a froth of delicious poison doled out
by tablespoons to children to conjure deep sleep
while Santa—that lovely lie—delivered his gifts.
Years later, I made it for my adult children, and
the grog was deemed the best ever. I never
stirred it up again, something unreal that night
about the floor, the ceiling, the bright Christmas
lights. All of us too happy, too calm, sitting in the
vast living room that overlooked the cypress trees,
Oakland spread out like a civic hallucination. How
hopeful I was for this tradition to sweep up my new
marriage, this new family, two stepdaughters with friends,
partners, all of whom liked me, my sons, my family.
We were a cobbled tribe built on a fissure, a marriage
that would not hold. Here I am, typing from another
house, another place, holding down my own life,
ignoring a tradition that will never occur again
in this lifetime, the recipe card folded up in the
back of a drawer, magic gone.
I Write My Future
My son tells me to be mindful. Craft carefully. He winks, remembering how I erased his former
girlfriend in novel three. What did I do to her? Got her accepted to a college in a cold city, wind
whipping as she looked out the large window onto the frozen lake. I’m nasty that way, just as I
was to myself when one of my characters left her perfectly good husband to take up with a man
who would only reveal his dark side late in the narrative, which is now for me, my husband
permanently back east eating cake with his family. What else? The mother with a declining
brain, the sister living Down Under, the uncle who is really a brother. Don’t write anything
crazy, my son says, now that he is single again, broken up with the woman I wrote for him at the
end of the frozen lake novel, a sparkly, wisecracking pixie, a wickedly smart writer, that
character. But I ended the novel, and things went off track in real life. So here is what I write
now: the main character will be happily alone for a couple of years (she can’t wait forever—she
a ragged hen with missing tail feathers). She pulls weeds in her garden, paddles canoes in rivers
and lakes, invites people over, sees movies, and watches birds with her new, enormous
binoculars. But that man in the other canoe, the one she likes? She finally asks him to coffee. I’m
not going to write more and ruin it for them, yanking both down a tragic relationship
superhighway. This story won’t be interesting. Nothing for a poem or a novel. Just a tale about
two people who do some things and keep on living until they don’t, the last word finally read.
Poof! Off they go, a wisp of nothing much. Don’t make so much of the ending, my son says.
