Contributor: Suez Jacobson

- -
Shards of life.
Fingernail clippings in the sink.
Blood washed down.
Body, dirt in process.
How will I remember?
These specks, concrete.
Too small to fill potholes of despair.
Sharp slivers, widening infection
In body-soul chasm?
Intangible
Shapeless, weightless memories
Linger, anguish, languish.
Sunny,
Horrific.
Neither willed away.
None neatly trimmed.
Metal snaps.
No scraps.


- - -
A poet in the making... maybe

Contributor: Susan (Suez) Jacobson

- -
From the vantage of privilege and luck
Happily clueless or helplessly stricken?
The responsibility to cry
Informed tears.
To understand why potency
Ground to blowing sand
Leaves tracks of grief and inaction.
Mentally ajar in a world where justice
Seems only an abstract idea.


- - -
Recovering economist turning to poetry and defense of the natural world.

Contributor: Suez Jacobson

- -
July's sticky heat
creates the opportunity
to merge with
the wandering, blue alpine puddle
ringed by pines,
tended by mountains
still marked with
winter's snows.
cold, clear, ripples of joy
spread out
from the body
imagining herself as fish
surrounded by
the tingling cold
that reaches deep
into her core.
she stays immersed
in the elegance of wild
until the shivers
overtake her deep desire for
the pure pleasure
of melding with
the elemental
reality of life.


- - -
Suez Jacobson is a person who would like to swim wild waters

Contributor: Suez Jacobson

- -
The world
The one I live in.
Or is it the one
I only read about
In the New Yorker?
Is foreign
Grimy
Pooled in sex
And hate
And death
And all that’s ugly
But passes as art.
Or is the art the stuff
That surrounds it
Critiques it
Make us question
Our own willingness to participate
In it
To sink into
The pool.
Become a part of the
Filth
If only to fit?
Or not.
Can we run
Or hide
Or just die?


- - -
An economist who is working to renounce to her identity in lieu of another, any other.

Contributor: Suez Jacobson

- -
The head
the body
the thinking
the doing
easier doing
just a body
on a bike
in the water
moving.
But the brain
intervenes
the thoughts pester you
challenges
expectations
you must respond
the brain never sleeps
the dreams persist
the shortcomings
the failures
the insecurities
all there
long after the body
finds rest.
But then the body
begins to crumble
left with a brain.
Please, no.
Too demanding.
Too close.
Too loud.


- - -
professor
trying to live lightly
and write

Contributor: Suez Jacobson

- -
Six days in the canyon.
Its river,
Its wind, sand, and sun,
become my only reality,
quiet my existence,
make it simple.
Time measured
by sun and stars.
Then,
Up, out of the depths,
away from the magic.
Weeks pass,
in the city,
traffic, people,
noise, grit,
washed-out skies,
frazzled consumers,
lined up,
buying,
electronics everywhere.
And yet,
At night,
when my eyes close,
I see the red-rock walls,
hear the river,
imagine the stars,
and feel the earth,
the sand,
and the wind.
The canyon is mine.
It is part of me.
And I am grateful,
for memory.


- - -
Economics professor trying to escape the numbers racket.

Contributor: Suez Jacobson

- -
I won, but then didn’t.
It felt like last, but it wasn’t.
Those eight-minute miles, were really ten.
The blisters were real.
The chafed and raw skin.
But other things mattered.
The miles were done.
A typo, a process, an early / late start.
It’s all in the mix of what happens or not.
We have little control.
Yet we go forward.
What is, is.
And maybe what’s not
Is what ought.


- - -
College professor of economics who has been trying to break loose from her academic training and refereed journal writings for years. There's not much time left.