Poetry by Josey Wallace

Josey Wallace is a student, stagehand, writer, and musician who lives in Winterville, Georgia and attends the University of Georgia. Her poetry uses form to explore the world of things and the process of thought in an effort to make "the report that only the poets can make".

Nightjars

In birds, frailty is becoming, lifting
their charming forms towards sky, adiabatic
flows they trace tracks of wordless symbols on -
in rats, obstinance is interesting:
resistance replacing flight, dramatic
and pugnacious, labyrinth lying beyond
it denied, precocious thing, still, listing…

Neither know anything of the lightness
of their bodies. A small creature, injured
or sickly can be held in cupped hands. Choice:
to move against all of reality
or placidly watch it, loving something
completely as it changes before you.
Consider first what it means to be saved,
then note the singing katydids, obliquely
harmonizing in long wordless phrases
a clever ostenato against the
chuck-will’s-widow’s chanting his own name.
The noble worm turns soil below you.
Soon, a wind will disturb the tops of the
tulip poplars, hush over everything -
Remember even the consecrated, the
pure, the beautiful, best loved things we know
crystal- slowly losing its -line structure.
Fade, order! What is good clings less, nothing
lost from it’s leaving, like listening to
coyotes at one distance and then a
second, then a third - until suddenly
not at all. They don’t make a sound at all.