Jessica Purdy | You’re Never the Same

You’re Never the Same. Ekphrastic poems by Jessica Purdy, selected by Ron Mohring as Number Four in Volume Eleven of our Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series.

Release date:  September 27, 2023 [49 copies]
21 pages
$12.00

Cover: vintage marbled end papers. 

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Radar, The Night Heron Barks, One Art, Hole in the Head Review, Museum of Americana, and Gargoyle. Murder in the House, a pamphlet of her poems on the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, was released by Buttonhook Press in 2022; the full chapbook of these poems, The Adorable Knife, was published by Grey Book Press in August 2023. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House  (a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry) were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. She is the author of the chapbook Learning the Names (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and is poetry editor for the anthology Ten Piscataqua Writers. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaPurdy123 and at her website.

Arca de Noé

[ after Leonora Carrington’s surrealist painting ]

My body is seasick with rot,
a few suns burn under my ribs
and bubble up to boil out my eyes.
I’m half a blown-out moon—
bone-brittle, cratered.

How strange to see
There’s a version of myself
over there behind the rock
bent double in selfish grief.
Is this what I get for thinking I could die?

The red deer are waiting
to climb aboard.
Where do they think I can take them,
when I’m so twisted in on myself,
my boards white as bone,
and my stern mocking me?

Who are these birds
that light on my other half,
and these cloud apparitions in the rain?

I dreamed of three brothers
throwing rocks off a rooftop.
The youngest had something to prove.
He threw too hard and as I watched,
he fell ten stories to the ground.

What have I done, bringing children
into everything?

[ our thanks to SurVision Magazine for first publishing this poem ]
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