IMG_7361The novel Clio’s Mobile Home is a facet of my creative work. Several characters in my novel write poems; I am serious about writing poetry. I also work on short shorts, and short stories. They are all modes of thinking about identity, transcendence and beauty in contemporary life. Art keeps us aloft, but it is more than decoration. Its force can be astounding. The artist becomes an instrument, and art lives to tell the tale.

Posted on May 17, 2014 by jillbpearlman | 50 Comments

The Shared Overlap of Skullcaps

Posted on March 23, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Naivëte, like a broken clock, gets it right twice daily. 
Jews and Muslims are cousins, are family, I hear 
in Morocco, from the taxi driver, the be-scarved woman 

guarding a blue synagogue. Even though they should be 
cranky, be-swearing food and drink; even as it’s Ramadan, 
and the driver in baseball cap careens in his springy red taxi.
God gives us strength.  Of Jews they smile, they glow.

In pious Fès, peace reigns. If you want to be sassy, 
you might wink about how Jews drink – 
so the guide in his djellaba believes. 

Later, the muezzin erupts as the sun sinks;
He has also marked the start of Shabbat.  The simultaneity 
of it, the shared overlap of skullcaps and wraps.  

A Jewish friend says, “It’s a blessing to be a Jew 
here.” A rare bird: she came back. Her wish blows
like the Sirocco: “if only all Muslims practice as they do in Morocco.”

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Towards a New Form

Posted on March 3, 2025 by jillbpearlman

How to dream
when the egg is already broken
whisk
until soft
and silky
in what colors
towards what peace

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Bag of Grief

Posted on February 23, 2025 by jillbpearlman

The human is a bag of grief; a bag pierced with holes, 
a multi-headed bag, split and split
again.  It still asks questions: Who put the country
in the blender and pressed whirr; who remembers 
when “decent” was what we called citizens?
Who let homo sapiens out of the bag 
to torture their own? 

I saw a moment’s splitting yesterday – 
We, human insects, on the glass slide of the microscope  – 
and We, watching through the eyepiece. 
We, both the hunter and We, the hunted. 
We, both hurt and light-headed.  
We, both nothings in history, and immured in our present.  

As water will run each morning
when we turn the tap and let it run,
so the bitterness that brittles the blood, 
that seizes and chokes off 
flow will flow again.  The tap runs; 
nothing obsesses me but life;
in the morning, desire runs again.

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It Poured Without Mercy

Posted on February 17, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Friends came for dinner, but nothing made 
her change her tone.  A steady strained B minor.  

The dogs laid their drooling maws on her thigh.  
First placid snow, then rain, like silent glistening strings
Of a harp. When did rain become opaque?

Gentle no longer recognized rain.  Since when 
did it pour without mercy, did it not droppeth
upon the place beneath? 

3am, she stared at the street, empty with its
parked cars, writhing trees, sordid light. 
It was not twice blessed.

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Dear Danielle

Posted on February 17, 2025 by jillbpearlman

I. M. Danielle Legros Georges

Grief splits me: a multi-headed creature
casting in all directions for answers. 
I rage and cannot understand; 
Though enough to know my reach is futile,
She is beyond.  It will pass; all things do.

After a meditation, I settle into a small cave 
of acceptance; rain pings as I sit on a warm 
radiator; the space dark and empty, 
neither me per se or her, 
a cave of cupped hands. 

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The Executive Restores Plastic Straws

Posted on February 9, 2025 by jillbpearlman

I’m a stowaway on a cold rubber boat. 

My desires and old love letters are the sails,
I paddle with spoons and old New Yorkers.  

From a surge of waves comes a sleek head,
a piercing in its nose –

A seal with a straw of plastic.

And birds fly, gone as my thoughts
to have remembered

what some once called “the other” –

small wonder; the Captain is burning
crotches with cigars; praising trench 

warfare with swigs of Coca-Cola, 
shooting maggots. A rhinoceros in pink tutu dances.  

With belt and surveillance cameras,
he tramples a dozen bouquets of white roses.

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Lost in the Narrative

Posted on February 3, 2025 by jillbpearlman

The cabin is clapboard white, its slanted roof white, 
drifts of snow are white.  
If not for the sun’s glitter, all would disappear.  
No one has written the story, as of yet no black letters. 

There comes the old woman, bent like a comma.
She is dragging a line of black text,
a large black seal, the kind that often loll
on beaches when tired of swimming.

It slides along the ice from left to right, 
an opening sentence, then halfway back
and back again. So many fragments… she is struggling
to maintain connection with a small moment of time

and it happens every day, small and 
ephemeral.  The seal may be her snow shovel. 
Love conquers all.  Wreckless cruelty will not win.
If only she could find the topic sentence.

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ER & DJT

Posted on January 20, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Some will look for a way out, an end to history; 
the woman who swallowed pills,
was rushed to the ER with an inked note
pinned to her sad, sallow blouse: 

DO NOT RESUSCITATE if Donald Trump wins.  
That was November, 2016. My doctor-friend had 
his orders: she won; she doesn’t have to relive 
the second debacle. Mother, who flirted with 

The Donald as cream to hot coffee,
as pretzels are drawn to bloody Mary.
He hit on a babysitter brought to her party – 
snubbed Mother when she quit his club.

Lothario of the quivering ego— he never spoke 
to her again. What would she, acid commentator 
of petty tyrants and babies – i.e., men’s totality – 
now say?  She too is spared the indignity.  

My letter carrier’s card-carrying union father kicked 
before Nov. 5th.  Spared again.  

No reason to leave this beautiful world just yet.  
The deep processes of awareness unfinished.
The blanks & pits & recommitment. 
Painful radiance will survive. 

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Hot Damn

Posted on January 13, 2025 by jillbpearlman

If I keep my doors open –
propped with a shoe or block – 
everything pours in 

A city licked, hot rage, 
a pit of immolation, a mess of
humanity tempted to leap,

grieving for lost secrets,
trinkets, old diaries, ardencies,
hot notes of love and pain

to fend off the evil eye, the rage 
of a tyrant who wields his baby rattle
like a gavel, his inner 

chambers nonexistent, his fire
and wind toxic. 

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Play It Again, Sam

Posted on January 6, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Once thought it a white man’s thing –
righteous poems lamenting time –
when fingertips that steady the fruit knife
scrape garlic, soothe kids know truth.

Now end of day, end of year 
silver threads of dusk 
hover on short hours.

Family that made the water
less leaden are gone.

Mirrors gang up, opalescent 
as oysters, staring – the tide, 
soft as zinc, washes and rises. 

And resolutions, renewal 
of renewal – exhausting!

Body will do what it wants. 
Already destined. Mad dance. 
Diamond.  Apple.  Meaning. 
The one thing we can’t see clearly 

and beg the angels for.
They, in their discipling act, 
laugh pity whisper, So be it, mortal, 
long, long on.

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