Jessica Goodfellow

Issues in Pronunciation

Once there was a girl whose mother didn’t like her. Then the girl, who confused caliper with caliber, the instrument of measuring with the thing being measured, grew up. Still the mother’s judgments rang in her ears. Mouth sealed before exploding into plosives, she still couldn’t go from p to b. Though her lips formed identical puffing postures, she couldn’t move from voiceless to voiced. Emptiness being, necessarily, its own container. Its uncontainable container.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Japan. www.jessicagoodfellow.com