Jeana Jorgensen
Winter
Each year winter takes my hands:
I imagine them, bundled off to become
A wreath to adorn the season’s front door.
My hands, red and crackled with eczema,
Nestle against a stranger’s hands,
Curled tight with tendonitis.
Raynaud’s colors the next pair over
(blue and purple, due to the cold)
While arthritis coils the next pair
Painfully inward, inward.
No shoveling snow for me,
Nor washing dishes,
Nor tugging off wool socks.
Maybe the steroid cream will work
This year; maybe not.
Heartbroken
How can I teach when I am heartbroken?
When my throat clenches,
when my words flee,
when my eyes blur,
how am I to softly compose
thoughts into images,
dreams into documents?
My fingers knit over one another:
nails picked to shards,
skin wan, hands trembling,
a rasp of calluses and dry patches,
a susurration of nerves.
You wouldn’t know
that my hands bleed in winter,
that my eyelids puff with tears,
that bloody noses dot my days
flaring red on white,
a rose on a snowy grave.
You might know if I told you
this, or anything remotely about my life,
or anything beyond
“Thank you, I will see who else is hiring”
and I hang up the phone
and curl around my heart
and clasp red hands to red nose,
wondering what my tears might teach
me, a teacher with no students,
a voice with no ear,
a vessel with no blood.
Wrung out
(though you wouldn’t know it)
burned out
(under layers of concealer)
and now I’m out of this game,
leaving skin flakes and droplets
where you once held my heart
in cupped hands, a classroom that—
if I leave my heart behind in it,
will there be no more heartbreak?
Jeana Jorgensen earned her PhD in folklore from Indiana University. She researches gender and sexuality in fairy tales and fairy-tale retellings, folk narrative more generally, body art, dance, and feminist/queer theory. Her poetry has appeared at Strange Horizons, Nevermore Journal, Liminality, Glittership, and other venues. Her first book, Folklore 101, was released on Halloween of 2021.