Bio
Jake Sheff is a major and pediatrician in the US Air Force, married with a daughter and three pets. Currently home is the Mojave Desert. Poems of Jake’s are in Marathon Literary Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. His chapbook is “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing). He considers life an impossible sit-up, but plausible.
Trigger Warning
After Kay Ryan’s “All Your Horses” and Gertrude Stein’s “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass”
A Golden Shovel from Sappho’s “Fragment 33,” tr. Mary Barnard
Say when a cousin is in the
gloss of rain – a kind of doorkeeper’s
teacher – a spectacle of feet
and teacups are more wet, are
more certain, are more twelve
than twelve dozen. Yards
of time collapse at eleven to one; long
for wet and colorful arrangements. Ten
is tiny twenty’s puny pony; shoemakers –
and not ordinary thoughts – are used
to odds like eleven to one. Five,
perhaps, is like a rupture; oxhides,
of course, cannot rupture a system to
pointing. Think again. Cobble
a sigh’s resemblance to signs, sandals
broken by a single, hurt sundial. For
difference unordered is retreading them!