For My Husband Each Time I Leave

By Sarah McCartt-Jackson / Issue 12

I piece together a puzzle while we’re apart.
First the frame, then the faces we know, and I name them all.
Then the palm trees we have planted, but not the sky. Though the moon
is easy, its three pieces: one for you, one for me, and one
left over. Now the car we have never driven and the signs
that glow. I don’t finish without you. It is not the same.
The frame is empty, and I leave it that way on a kitchen table
somewhere in the mountains far from you, and farther
from home. Maybe I’ll rearrange the lamps now. Move
their bulbs into different rooms. See how the light changes.

SARAH MCCARTT-JACKSON is a Kentucky poet and folklorist, as well as the author of Stonelight (winner of the Weatherford Award in Poetry and the Airlie Prize, Airlie Press) and three chapbooks: Calf Canyon, Vein of Stone, and Children Born on the Wrong Side of the River. Her poetry has appeared in Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Bellingham Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, NANO Fiction, and others. She received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and has served as artist-in-residence for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Note: the title and first sentence of “Hard River” are borrowed from Kelly Terwilliger.