Two Poems
Jackie Clark

Black Mirror

In search of spaces that aren't white,
remove bundled hairs & debris
from crevices of cement.

Leaving the world is as easy
as rolling over; the wind causes
branches to shake, not their height.

You promise migratory renderings
a resting place far away from intimacy,
whose every angle looks black & prepared to engulf.



(Story)

The girl aligns all the objects in a room. She takes photos. Heralded in the corner, she pushes record and answers unheard questions into a pink and green box. The girl changes colors. She sleeps in bathing suits and thinks up instances when someone she does not know stops her. There is driving. There is no time to look at what's leaving. There is no time to read about it in a book or underline its shapes. The pink trim speaks to the windows. It swallows up the corners but lets small buckets fill up below. She sleeps on damp blankets and doesn't move. She dips her hand over the edge and reaches for familiar shapes, unsure of who she is lying next to. In the gray house there are two beds. One of them is close to the floor, where once she found four hands. In the house on the nameless street, the bed folds open and withstands little pressure. Her body as light as it could. She has thinks about water and then packing and then about giving it all away.