Jacquelyn Shah

Unsayable

She doesn’t understand. Just when she shimmers                            
alone on the open road,                                                                     
clouds of fluster and sour chords signal                                            
the past she does not remember.                                                       
The dead light up,                                                                              
delivering their own telegrams                                                          
for what seems minutes in mid-air.                                                   
She withers, as if she doesn’t know what wither is,                          
waiting to be called into the sky                                                        
to swallow the unsayable things.                                                       

Cento––lines, in order of appearance, from:
Beate Sigriddaughter, Onkar Sharma, Krystal Languell, Michael Mark, Spring Ulmer,
Chen Chen, Cindy Veach, Ting Li, Christopher Shipman, Christopher Salerno

 

Jacquelyn "Jacsun" Shah holds A.B., M.A., M.F.A. & Ph.D. degrees––English/creative writing–poetry; has published a chapbook, small fry, a full-length book, What to Do with Red, poems in journals, and was the 2018 Literal Latté Food Verse Contest winner. She happily identifies as: quirky, outlier, iconoclast, pacifist, misfit.