Featured Fifty Poetry: Jack, Again

Kristine Williams teaches at Hocking College, a small two-year college in southeast Ohio. She has been married for 21 years. She and her husband have a daughter who is a sophomore at Ohio University and a son who is a senior at Athens High School. Kristine writes poetry weekly with a small group. She is involved with an Appalachian women's poetry initiative, and runs to clear her head.

Jack, Again

Tall and awkwardly lanky

you slouch onto the bus

collapse in the seat

near the back,

asleep again before

the doors close.

Mussed hair, red

as a copper penny,

a copper pot bottom,

flattened against the

window, except where

it sticks up, cowlick

unapologetic.

I think

how much easier you

are than your sister.

I think

last year

forgetting picture day

would have involved

wild weeping,

slamming doors.

I think

how like your father

when you say

It's chill, mom.

I think

on this early October morning,

fog pooling in

the ravine where the deer

run heedless of the

danger of hoof on rock,

I think

how huge this feeling

is, how it feels

as though I can't contain

this much inside

this fragile body.