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Jacqueline Vogtman is a poet and fiction writer residing in New Jersey. She received her BA in English and creative writing from The College of New Jersey, and she has worked various jobs including cleaning churches and proofreading greeting cards. In the fall of '08 she will be attending Bowling Green State University to work towards her MFA in Creative Writing. She has also had poetry and fiction published in The Rectangle.
Jacqueline Vogtman
Before I learned how to lie with a man,
my sister taught me how to hang dead
roses upside down on the wall. After
weeks of lowering their heads, she took
and hung them by dripping stems, a bundle
opposite our beds, swaying, on display,
like the tender meat of a slaughtered calf.
How quick the course from roses
to her own blooming—the length of time
three bouquets, white, pink, red (snow,
breast-buds, blood slapped on a sheet
waking her a woman). How quick her course
from woman to mother. She left petals
floating off like cut hair, swept under a rug.
Those petals thin as the shed snake skin we
once found, sloughed off in dirt, a snake’s
discarded dress, delicate, lace. We crushed it,
rubbed its dust in our dumb fingers, watched it
waft away, destroyed but beautiful, like my sister,
whose feet planted deeper into the carpet each day,
victim of a new gravity that held us all in its orbit.
Only the roses defied this gravity, bent heads
straining toward their stems, their green,
raw, wet beginning, and to the ceiling,
their sky, where they still dreamed to rise.