Celia’s Still Life
Statues more alive than a dozen children wiggling to be so still. Feeling whatever they felt however long it took to unfix a stare. To live like that! Somehow I knew, it’s all in the lips. Struck my pose, hand stretched out. Before I could settle into the right expression, the teacher palmed my hand, drew me back into the squirming circle.
Darren Jackson’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Circumference, The Pinch, The Laurel Review, The Offending Adam, Bluestem, and other journals. He has been a VCCA Fellow in France and Virginia and received a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 2013. He has translated Life in the Foldsby Henri Michaux (Wakefield P, forthcoming Fall 2014); “The White Globe,” an essay by Bertrand Westphal, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in the The Planetary Turn: Art, Dialogue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st-Century; and A Free Air by Albane Gellé.
Photo credit: Neuenberg Statue With Child by Brian Kelley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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