lie sideways, rumor has it—
tossed with unknown members.
Forensic science, what a bother.
A little know-how and you’ve
lost the fairytale. Exhumed
dirty limbs only to reveal
the not-so features of another.
Pieces of your architecture
we suture from the ground:
a tall man (not you),
a black man (not you),
another unmarked grave.
Certainly not the boon
we seek—a reenactment
statue, a gated stone, a hole
to place a flower with a note.
Dear Daniel Boone, I love
you more than I love this
carnal species. For your
silence, a plastic crate.
For your clavicle, a duplicate
entrance. Your appendages
lying exactly nowhere on a map—
the greatest commemoration for
this tall, flat site of reversals.
And no territories to separate
and no corpse to fear or prize.
Your body, a procession of ants
scattering across bright white.
Jessica Q. Stark a mixed-race, Vietnamese American poet working and living in Durham, North Carolina. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke University, where she writes on comics in poetry and curates the Little Corner Poetry Reading Series. Her chapbook, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for Heavy Feather’s Double Take Poetry Prize in 2016. A mini poetry chapbook, “Vasilisa the Wise,” is forthcoming with Ethel in 2018. Her first full-length poetry book, Savage Pageant, is forthcoming with Birds LLC. She writes an ongoing love poem for the Internet in her poetry zine, INNANET.