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.  

 

Before the Hebrew "trayf" meant "anything deemed unkosher," it meant "torn," as in, “He shall not eat a carcass or anything that was torn (trayfah), thereby becoming unclean through it” (Leviticus 22:8).   So while one might hope for a "yishuv ha-da'at," a "settled mind," far more common is a mind distracted, unable to focus—a "trayf da'at," a "torn mind."

 
Jessica Jacobs

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, a memoir-in-poems of love and marriage, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry and one of Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica serves as Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It!, a collection of writing prompts from Spruce Books, an imprint of Penguin/RandomHouse. Her collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2024.

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