by J.I. Kleinberg
Three windows face into the garden, sills crowded
with stones. We’ve stolen the stones from beaches,
our pockets weighted, each a time capsule conveyed
from afar, each a tale with its own song, its own heat,
the spark of its beginning and journey. What distances
they have known – lifted, crept, rolled, once, for a moment,
flew. What epochs of creatures and catastrophes.
Broken and restitched, possessed of silence and noise.
No longer redolent of the sea, each rock is a paragraph
to decipher. You set one in my hand and the story passes
between us, its syntax familiar, its words all new. We never
tire of this conversation, a tenderness spoken hand to hand:
our communion of minerals. What happened here, we ask –
this one smooth, a pale wedge peaked in caramel, this one
an encircling of planetary rings crossed by a slender band
of white that came late and sudden and changed everything.
A rock as easy to misuse as love, I have touched a warm stone
with my tongue. Tasted you, salt and mineral. Some nights,
I watch the moon lick their cool backs, recognizing a shared
desire for light. Who will notice them when we are gone,
set a stone on the sink or the nightstand, on a grave?
Who will return them to the sea, or wonder why this one
is shaped like a bone, that one like a fish? We eat at this table
by the windows and read poems aloud, the seasons announced
by snow and deer, Steller’s jays, spiders, wind. Bodies lined
and dusty, tumbled and worn, we watch one another for breath
and tremor, hold in our hands, against our cheeks, a cataclysm
of memories, a deepening sediment of unexpected joy.
::
J.I. Kleinberg is an artist, poet, freelance writer, and three-time Pushcart nominee. Her poetry has appeared in print and online journals and anthologies worldwide. In addition to Sleeping Lessons (Milk & Cake Press, 2025), her chapbooks include The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press, 2023), How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Press, 2023), and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23, 2023). A full-length volume of visual poems, She needs the river (Poem Atlas) was published in 2024. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg.
Image: Harshit Joshi
ID: A collective of pebbles.
Psaltery & Lyre 