Jamie FitzGerald
Jamie Asae FitzGerald currently serves as California Program
Assistant for Poets & Writers, Inc. Her poetry has appeared in the
journals Fulcrum, Ariel, and Snow Monkey, as well as the
King County Poetry on the Buses Project. She was the recipient of an
Academy of American Poets College Prize and is an alumna of San Diego
State University’s creative writing program, where she co-hosted
WHACKJOB!, a monthly reading series and open mic, and taught creative
writing, literature, and composition. She lives in Los Angeles.
The Turtle
You blend in with stones
algae, rock—I know
if I picked you up
you'd be cool to touch.
Your head would retract
and your elephant paws
would fin the air
with a noiseless grace.
In the water, those soft
elegant feet sway like palms
do a rond de jambe
to make your body glide.
I want to be you—
a stone with a soul
suspended in the pond
tip of nose touching air—
you near the pollen-flecked pool
stark still on a warm rock
light, fish and plant
trembling around you.
Dégagé
(Disengaged)
A movement or position in which the working leg is lifted off the
floor.
The flat of my foot sucks the surface, each bone
clinging as it slides across the floor on a horizontal,
balls of feet loving contact reach through leather
and marley toward a vibrant core.
Knowing the architecture of my body will require a lift,
I strain my heel upward. It must hold to the arch, churned
in a sculpted curve, bend the outer tarsal like steamed cedar
of a bentwood box.
The damp tarsal lifts from the floor, turning under itself
like bandages on a barber pole. Now there is just the ball:
firm breasts of the feet lingering on the surface
push themselves into the toes.
There, the most articulate configuration of bone and joint,
delicate shift of phalange, cuboid and ligament, long tug
and definition of skeleton through skin, each toe
from pinky to hallux following the train of the ground
to that final kiss, sailing into a new element.
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