E is for Edifice

Ashaki M. Jackson

E is for Edifice:

this structure of bones. Pelvic curves and vertebrae, requisite arches of its entrance.
Imagine lovers dripping off warm beds. Slack-jawed.

Estuary: mouths spilling into the tide, hosanna swelling the waters with pace –
a Sunday saunter.

E is for gathering: sharing one’s skin to the follicle. A meeting in the altar.

Excrement, collecting on itself meat and grain, patient for benediction.

Ear: a stooped man, limbs drawn into himself. A collection plate. A device to
fashion verse into prayer: hammer, anvil, stirrup.

E is for conversion between living and stillness. Eulogy, dirge, exhumation.

Trinity.

Poet and Social Psychologist Ashaki M. Jackson will write for red velvet cake. She eats carbs, thinks Plascencia’s People of Paper is an elegant blueprint for a coup, and considers Kara Walker her “most treasured paper doll.” Hear her on Blog Talk Radio. Read her in publications by The Drunken Boat, Poems for All, and Cave Canem. Watch for her first poetry collection, to be published by Akashic Books imprint Black Goat in 2010.

photo by Ryan Spence