You are not the only house of ruin.
The prairie grass thirsts beneath
a full arriving squall I withhold.
Farmers, desperate for crops, seek
copperheads, touch their cucumber
musk airborne & pray for revival.
Barn, forgive me for this respite,
this forced terror in uncomfortable
stillness. Soon I will shudder
the ocherous field, its sprawling
parch. Soon I will open,
pray the soil doesn’t recoil.
Barn, I am afraid of excess;
sometimes I do not know when to let up.
Jaclyn Rachel (she/they) is a hard-of-hearing, queer disabled poet and aspiring creative nonfiction writer. She has an MFA in poetry from UCR MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, where she received a scholarship to attend the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop. Her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, NAILED Magazine, The Legendary, and Chapparal. When not engaged in the writing life, Jaclyn builds SEO campaigns for a tech startup.