Mark Jackley‘s work has appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Sugar House Review, Natural Bridge and other journals. His new book of poems On the Edge of a Very Small Town is available for free via email request.

All The Hungry Years

“I was obsessed with Dickinson. A professor gave me her
collected poems, three volumes in a boxed set. A lovely thing.
It fared very badly in Florida, all those years, eaten by insects.”

Joy Williams

one was
I like to think
a ladybug a little
beetle in whose tummy
the leaves of beans and turnips
composted with a liquor
never brewed and feathers,
a certain slant of light
on winter afternoons