Wind grates through my rafters these winter evenings,
harmonizes with the owls & crickets. I remember
the tune men once sang working through me
& recall the geometry
of those workers’ hands, each triangular
gap that held a nail, the silent choreography
of fingers that reached, each callous
pressed to a knot, a blemish.
What doesn’t pass through me these days
is light to unhaunt the gut of me.
Even fleeting.
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.