Jamie Marie | On the Lake

Note: X-linked Myopathy with Excessive Autophagy (XMEA) is an uncommon form of muscular dystrophy. It is usually passed down through the women and may affect their male children.

And the Lord said unto them:

let an angel mark some of your children

with blood to spare them;

let the males of your line be more vulnerable

to this defect (like Pharaoh’s own).

This will come with tides of regret, a flood

of hesitance—have you no faith,

o fallen woman, or do you wisely brace

yourself against the plagues of medical bills?

Which will you be then, a Jonah or Job—

complaining and worrying over nothing and

roiling in the centrifugal whirl

or gratefully praising the good that remains?

Either way, you’ll probably still feel betrayed,

bereft of a vindication for your indulgent tears.

Incense

By far more pleasant than other types of small scale smoke,

rivaled only by the earthy cracklings of bonfires.

A part of the charred stick droops, a fragrant pendulum

that drips ashes below (a dry puddle of grit),

as the pale smoke spirals into ribboned arabesques.

Whenever I watch these lackadaisical trails pushed gently

in the air, I think of Sister Rita, who admitted in whispers

to me and my fellow first graders that she would watch

the incense smoke while the other sisters prayed each night.

I remember wondering, even then, what was wrong

with gazing on something beautiful, the thin strips like gauzy tulle.

The Resistance of Memory

My grandma used to paint with oils

until she grew tired of warning her seven children

and all their friends that streamed through the house

to be careful they didn’t smudge the canvases.

My mother idolized her cousin who went to art school

and when she went on fishing trips with dad and me,

she brought colored pencils and sketched wildflowers.

I flickered back and forth between them,

reeling in bluegill and drawing my own crooked daisies.

I often watched Bob Ross with grandma

in the room with her largest surviving painting:

a cabin’s window the only light given to a shadowed forest path.

Mom mentioned dad had been so good, he could have done

comics professionally, sharp and photorealistic.

Her cross-stitch picture of a bobcat that won $25

at the county fair hung in the hallway.

Years later, one of the only questions grandma could still ask,

when she thought the sunset caught the house on fire each night, was

“Are you still drawing?”

Jamie Marie holds an MA in Literature and recently rediscovered her passion for library work, book repair, and book arts. She was active in a writing group with her high school friends, unofficially published in their collective anthologies, and previously published in her college’s literary magazine. Growing up in a Catholic Appalachian family gave her an interesting perspective on things before broadening her horizons. She lives with her spouse and their two cats.