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Jacqueline Renee Ahl
Jacqueline Renee Ahl is currently
the Specialist for Disabilities and Learning at the State University
of New York at New Paltz, where she earned a BA in English with
an Emphasis in Creative Writing for the Theater and a Minor in Philosophy
in August 1998, and an MA in English in 2006. She served as Director
of the SUNY New Paltz Creative Writing Mentoring Program from 2000-2005,
working with emerging writers in the areas of fiction, poetry, playwriting
and screenwriting. She also served as Executive Grant Writer and
performer for Arts for Peace, a local organization of artists and
activists. She now spends her summers teaching writing, philosophy,
and improv courses for the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Vassar
College. Jacqueline has been a featured reader at many Hudson Valley
NY events and venues, including Poetry on the Loose, the “Calling
All Poets” reading series, the Voices of the Valley Reading
Series (sponsored by Poets and Writers), and Arts on the Bridge.
Her absurdist play Fear Itself was awarded Best New Play
for 2005 (One Act Division) in the Brevard Little Theatre international
playwriting competition. She is most interested in experimental
pieces that bridge the genres of poetry and drama, and is currently
working on a series of performance poems for multiple voices. She
is also anticipating publication of her first collection of poetry,
Underdog Lovely, in 2009.
ahlj@newpaltz.edu
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UNION
The Ceremony-- Sarah
I.
What you remember of us
belongs only in the arms of the moment--
the ice cubes warming each other to water
the chime of bodies under a window sill
the globes of eggs beading in the heat.
Put it away
smoothed like a wedding gown into the corners of a closet
fingered when the nights are fitful and cold
the white spine, the underarms
still smelling of nervous anticipation,
the hands of cousins and aunts reaching inside to button
dreaming their cotton bodies into satin,
remembering their own forgotten ways.
They look at one another, condemning the curse
of soft flesh, trust, ears unstopped,
the hands’ tangent
already in the trajectory of loss.
“There is such a thing as too much love”
--they warn her against it
button tighter than her breath can catch
touching her as if to make sure they, too, were once real.
Memory is the wedding gown stained with blood.
The once that smells of always.
The She put on display—
glass-heavy, church-bell sad
the woman
no one else will ever touch.
The Bed-- Justine
II.
At night
you dream the sleek rapture of hair about a neck
tightening until the life slips out like straw.
You wake in the sweat of love’s dark noose
dialing 911 against the pads of pillows
the groan of a name like a sentence.
“Too much, too much”
--always the excess, the heart scraped against the baking bowl
raw egg and dark batter up the wrist
rings tongued clean by his wicked smile.
In the curtained kitchen,
something dangerous rising.
The Portrait-- Rose
III.
In photographs, we are straw figures arrayed like sudden dolls.
Fake fixtures of ceiling fans spun to silence
stopped clocks
hands laid over hands
the pinholes of dark eyes suggesting little
inviting the onlooker
”Guess”
Caught moths, pinned to the walls of our choosing.
We are beautiful when still.
The painting hangs over a shoulder,
the plant angled, hair plaited, turmoil annulled.
Beyond the frame is the carved bed
bowed from bodies like an old horse
the floor with knots like eyes and finger slivers
the table with elbow marks, heavy with heads
the scissored give-up of love letters.
Our held breath
perfect like the postcard of a plane before impact
perfect like the upturned face of a tree before lightning.
Perfect like the smile of the flash-blind
seconds before the world returns.
The Sacrifice-- Tobian
IV.
Forgiveness is an opiate.
I spit wine into the root, the tree that grants life,
surrender a neck of white feathers under a patient axe.
She knows what’s coming, shudders into death like a dream.
I soften under your touch like old sheets
oiled leather
fine foxglove.
We tremble like candles.
It is impossible to tell if the shadows that net the ceiling
are lost birds or bats.
Our love, the aviary gone awry,
feathered bodies hopping about the cosmos
picking stars like berries
nests like whirled planetary paths
the hugeness of all our small things,
talons on wrist,
wax,
black oars circling a fawn.
You come to rest in me.
Sleep, forgiveness, the opiate.
In the blood pool of your gaze
the oracle of all I am.
The Ring-- Billie
V.
The first was a tin thing
shined on the tail of your shirt
plumbed from Levis into palm
hot cracked vinyl creaking with our weight
you had a way of tonguing my ear that made me think
of cat tails, damp cotton, the absent touch of reading.
Too big for my finger, and you wrapped it with fishing line,
twisting gently over knuckle
lifting my mouth to yours
pushing away the dark cloud of our clothes
promising worlds beyond the broken horizon of a town line
empty filling stations and the same statues at every bus stop
a warm pickup with shoes perched on dash
our two-step in headlights under mosquito radio drone
a tin ring polished under shifting bodies.
Beyond the dark halo of your hair,
a skyline studded with promise of Cadillacs and diamonds.
The Burial-- Sarah
VI.
After the first night,
I put a knife to the rope of my hair,
severing its flesh from my body.
Coiled it in an old blanket, brought to the yard
like a dead baby.
Balancing shovel, lantern, bundle.
Girlhood gone.
You watched from the window while I knelt, back burning.
Down into the earth the curled years
falling away in expectation of age, dropped limbs,
something sweet and stronger.
The lamp ran low, my awkward prayer abandoned.
Dusting earth from knees and shouldering the shovel.
Door creaking.
From you, the strange embrace--
touching the shoulder skim of shorn locks, my naked neck,
as if burned,
quizzical and silent.
Severance pay.
Nights after, you still reached up to touch
as if the ghost of her and it remained.
Less of me to pull to you, to keep.
The ground outside is alive with whispers
names groaned into her hair by men
now trapped in darkness.
She kept but one.
A single strand, bright as a wedding band,
binds her to him, in a wooden box near the bedstead.
It is just enough love.
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