I declare myself a member of the freckled race.
Sun flirts with me, sprinkles its prickles of light
down my uncovered inner elbows, clavicles,
and cheeks. I raise my darkness like a perforated shield,
but never quite enough to tough the world’s troubles out.
Not out of my mind, not out of sight:
Children’s faces sucked back into the caverns
between zygomatic bone and mandible,
Do souls eat flesh there when no nourishment comes?
Shell-splintered of home-walls’ lethal weight
where the ancients stayed who could not evacuate,
nor shoulder, one more time, hope’s taxing freight.
It’s too much for even my dreams to thrash through
back to a still point, the conjunction of love and reason
resting, wanting to nest like a denned maternal lion
in a strong, generative peace in this cold season.
No apocalypses, no absolutes; rather,
mottling and dappling of sin, grace, and nuance
enough to undazzle our retinas to see,
to find our way forward. A flag of no single hue,
but variegated, parti-color, true
and worthy to fly over us all, I can imagine.
I come from elsewhere to here with my suitcase of hope
and my blemished identity, ready to meet you.
Jennifer M. Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower, with two chapbooks, Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022. Phillips’ work appeared in over 100 journals, and is twice-nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Poetry Prize.
