Poetry
from Vol. 16, No. 2
A Body by the Wayside Strange
In the dark circumference, night inscribes.
Night inscribes a dark circumference, verily littered with bodies.
Things that hang from trees: bottles, lights, beads, men.
The in-mixing of water like blood.
Brackish means can’t wash the salt from the fresh.
A Jubilee is when the creatures of the bay hurt so bad for oxygen
they throw themselves onto the land to be scooped up or gigged.
A fist locks around something that’s already gone.
The violence our bodies long to make.
Between the cypress and the canebrake, a brown wasteland of death’s head birds.
The impaler bird saves its prey by thrusting it onto the barbed spindles of farm fences.
You can’t keep the sun from rising.
What is worse? The sun rising, revealing a figure
broken from time, who moves now as the trees move?
Or the restless waiting for the boy who should wake in his bed?
Jesseca Cornelson is an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University. Her poems have appeared in Cellpoems, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Other Journal, and Willows Wept Review. She is a native of Mobile, Alabama. “A Body by the Wayside Strange” references the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile by the local KKK in 1981.