Jeanine Walker
End-Stop
I am tired of prose.
Times like these with so many sudden absences, certain deaths
require poetry, whose natural form
of erasure lends itself
to our understanding of whyif not why, how
how will we survive?and if not,
how will we survive the loss of those who do not
“it’s the end of society,” my father says, frightened
as he watches his livelihood disappear, the stocks plummet
the directive to “wash your hands” feels sorely lacking
all of our hands devoid by now of palm prints
poetry will not save us, science willbut first it will be poetry
that gets us through
the way it can move through a line with silence,
how it’s been preparing us our whole lives
to know how it feels to be without
—Submitted on 03/20/2020
Jeanine Walker‘s full-length poetry collection, Painter Dreams a Woman, is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and other journals. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Living in Seattle, she teaches public school students through the Writers in the Schools program and adults at Hugo House.
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