Jackie Chicalese

Subsidence

One minute, 25-year-old Marie Mitchell was handing young Jule Ann Fulmer a piece of fruit as they walked along Mill Street in Pittston. Moments later, her 2-year-old niece was gone. 
                —Times Leader

                Pittston, Pennsylvania 
                February 1944

Before I knew it, the sidewalk gaped
            away from her feet. I watched baby Jule
                        tear from the useless anchor of my grasp

& plummet into the anthracitic dark.
            So quick, I couldn’t metaphor
                        her snowsuit or bonnet into anything

miraculous. No swan’s wing or sail.
            Frozen, I strained to hear the blunt
                        acoustic a body might make as it lands,

how, against the railway tracks
            underground, her little head might bell.
                        But I heard no sound except my heart

like a river inside my ears,
            the thrum from my throat all mineral
                        & damp. What a mess

Morgan Coal made of this town,
            the earth hollowed out beneath us.
                        What myth made of my little girl,

swallowed by a ragged & otherworldly hunger.
            How others would come to know
                        the disaster only by her tangerine bright

as a coin on the pavement,
            & by my hand, clutching
                        the air where her wrist had been.

Jackie Chicalese is an aphantasic poet from coal country, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Salt Hill Journal, The Greensboro Review, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.