EMILY JUKICH - POEMS

Emily Jukich is an emerging poet and writer who's spent much of her life in the Midwest. Much of her writing focuses on mental health and the struggles unseen of those afflicted. Her writing takes its time to find the right words to salve wounds and explore both the light and the dark of being different. There's a part in all of us that want to be heard and to believe our voices matter and she is working to find her voice through writing and healing and hopes to go back to school to get her Masters in creative writing one day. When not holding a pen, her and her new husband find time to enjoy all the quiet times with their 4 fur babies and walking around their local parks.

Sunflower Nonsense
​

​Those stalks of strength
Tall fields of wanting
Faces turned towards their God
as if to mimic her
while sunbeams grow from
cotton petals
I see them,
their awkward limbs
yearning to follow while a single
cloud can blind them
Van Gogh’s anguish in oil pastel
Necks bowed in prayer for
the lost deity
There are days I turn my back on
this sunflower nonsense
Chasing a mischievous force
whose light shines elsewhere to say
“This today, is not for you.”

Murder in the Summertime
​

​A body in the grass,
motionless in the afternoon heat
I woke---blades
kissing punctures
up my arm,
a pattern of
ornate, bleached lace
pressed on my wrist.
Standing,
that crushed patch
of earth wears my body
like a birthmark
A crime scene
A bullet reminder that
just for a moment,
existence happened here.
 
 

White Roses
​

​Puckered edges
of spoiled milk
Decay of soft linen
across the velvet swatch of petals
They are dead memories
Nostalgic mirrors
Once full of need,
full of want
held in suspension
long past their prime
I keep them on my table
to remind myself
flowers are just as
beautiful when
they are
wilting

If we must be ashes
​

​Tiny flame
Crackling heartbeat
That tender joust we play between
flicker and blaze.
 
Not love, no.
That’s too porcelain.
Too pirated from so many others
who believe we should burn.
 
I’ve no interest in lighting the sky on fire,
 
but it seems in all scripture,
there cannot be love without heat.
 
So darling, if we must
let us be phoenixes.
For if we are to burn,
let us live through it a thousand times.
 
 

Ode to the Reader
​

​All words are stolen.
That is the threat of language.
Yet, all I want is to give you
the first words
 
The words that belong to only you
to tuck behind your ears
and spread along your footprints
to make tracks within your soul
 
I want you to know your beauty
is more than a metaphor
simply from the way you speak
because yes,
 
there is honey on your lips
from every gentle, wild,
stringy vowel you’ve let slip
 
Where consonants sound
like constellations
for me to ladle stardust
and drip that silver broth
along your tongue
 
For how can you be both sky
and earth and every element
love-pressed into my pages
 
You are so much more
than what I can gift you
that hasn’t already been spoken
 
That I would commit theft
to hear you howl
rather than make love to silence
is a merciful violence.
 
There is nothing and everything
to describe this.
The largest word ever uttered.
A hummingbird’s stamina.