All in by Jessica Jacobs

Torn Mind

by Jessica Jacobs



Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!

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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Jessica Jacobs, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 4 pm, Room 8302

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Avivah Zornberg notes וַיֵּ֣שֶׁב יַעֲקֹ֔ב Vayeshev Yaakov (And Jacob
settled)—the first words of this parshah—point to Jacob’s

desire for יִשּׁוּב הַדַּעַת yishuv ha-da’at (a settled mind), as
opposed to הַדַּעַת טֵירוּף tiruf ha-da’at (a torn mind).


A rabbit savaged in the field, my mind
is that torn, that scattered.
All dog-paddle day, all surface
and screens, I sink sometimes
but bob back up.
Someone, somewhere
needs an answer.
Not bold enough to run from destiny,
I let it seep from me instead.

So though he shivered in the briny dark,
krill wreathing his ankles, I find
I am jealous of Jonah.

Like Nineveh, I am a city in need of saving.
Like Jonah, I have words stuck
in the scrim of my ribs
and the whale seems
an ideal retreat—
three days, three nights
at a depth I can barely imagine.

The whale, both vessel and message:
to settle into time like it does
into water. To patient
beside the rumbling pump room
of the heart. The quiet there
like God—nowhere and everywhere
at once. The holiness of that
wholeness. Of what rises to meet it.

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Jessica Jacobs is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards; Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse). She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

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"Torn Mind" from unalone © 2024 by Jessica Jacobs. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

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by Jessica Jacobs

  “Other lovers want to live with particular eyes

                                        I only want to be your stylist.”

                                        —Pablo Neruda


Who needs Rumpelstiltskin, when such treasure

abounds: her gold woven

around my bike gears, tangled in my toothbrush,

vining every drain—even, sometimes, found

in my mouth upon waking. And just

this morning, from the bathroom, she called me in.

            My mama’s the only one who ever

            brushed out my hair, she said. But you’re

            my wife. You should know.

                                                                                                    

I began at the bottom, her curls separating

with the thick sound of good cloth tearing.

            Do you see why I had no friends

            when I was little? she asked. Mama

            brushed out my hair each day before school.

I eased my fingers, for the first time,

all the way through; asked how that felt for her.

            Vulnerable, she said.

Shimmering out beneath the overhead light—a climbing

of kudzu, a symphony of trumpet vines—her hair revealed itself.

            It was like Velcro, she said. Anything would stick in it—

            bubble gum, spitwads, pencils. I’d come home crying

            and Mama would hold my ugly, frizzy head

            and say, Baby, they’re just jealous.

            As though her love could make the lie so.

When it comes to her, her mother and I

have this kind of love in common. Only now, the lie

has come to pass. My wife, whose hair

is the shade of farm-fresh yolks, the color of things rich

on the tongue. Whose hair sings the plaintive song

of bed springs. Whose hair is the drifting

smoke from a village of chimneys, corkscrews

enough for a thousand bottles of wine. A ski slope

of s-curves, a grove of twirling maple keys,

every playground slide

worth sliding. Before a rapt audience,

a company of ballerinas cambers their hands

to trace out, in the air, your hair; my dear angora

goat, my cloud of bats spiraling from the cave.


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Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her second collection Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2019. She lives in Asheville with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and serves as the Associate Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. You can find more of her work at www.jessicalgjacobs.com.