Three Poems

by Jory Mickelson

[No matter how often & how far]

No matter how often
& how far you digress,
no matter how many
clever improvisations you make,

so long as you patiently
bring yourself back. I had
one serial talent, but
no one knew what

it was. It was being—
never being able to
be pinned down.
The more you probe

the more you find
the whole world
incomprehensible. I can be
anything, just look at me—

I am my own reference
& letter of recommendation
& withering critique.
My work, my life

has a certain distance.
I am the quintessential
American—more and more
of me to come &

the growing terror
of my smallness.
Give me a crowded city,
dirty apartments stacked

to the sky, floating
with roaches. They are
something to say hello to
when I walk in the door.

[I’m so tired of elegance]

I’m so tired
of elegance, so I use

all my weaknesses
& desperate feelings.

Paint and repeat,
until popularity itself

becomes a clone, thin
as a screen. Thinner.

We know an artist is
a negative

space defined
just as easily by

absence. How to
transform all my

emptiness into—
a territory

where many things happen
within the borders.

[Wasn’t I a little bit]

wasn’t I a little
bit of music    humshape

of cricket leg rubbing
against the frog’s

swallow          tunescape
of moonlight of August heat

and pond’s humidity
I’ve never lived

outside the city
so my song’s       just

conjecture       unless we
listen to the sirens’

syncopation and the argument
through the wall           somewhere

my psalm’s still
circulating in the busbrake

in the way the escort
rubs their blackened eye

Jory Mickelson is an award-winning writer and educator living in Xwotʼqom / Whatcom / Bellingham on the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. They are the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (2025), All This Divide (2024), and Wilderness//Kingdom (2019) which won a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest DIAGRAM, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jubilat and other journals in the US, Canada, and the UK. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and have received fellowships from The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. To learn more about their work visit www.jorymickelson.com

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