Jennifer Bullis
Originally from high-desert Nevada, Jennifer Bullis relishes living in Bellingham, Washington, which receives three-and-a-half feet of rain per year.
She teaches community-college writing and literature, and with her husband, Mark, is happy parent to a horse, four cats, and one smallish human, John Benjamin, healthy and all smiles, above.
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To John Benjamin, in the Sixth Month
“[I]n their terminal structure, narrations are rehearsals for death . . .”
—George Steiner, Real Presences
This, then, will be no narration.
It’s toward breath that I’m gestating you
despite your heart arrhythmia, despite
the knowledge that its beats are, ultimately,
finite. Sure, death is the other that waits
for us both, but you are the other other
I encounter in the strange labyrinths of my
own tissue. Under my heart and its slower
pulsing, you hear me speak and sing. Later,
altered, you will claim language for yourself
when you perceive that I am other than
you. Will you recall enough, then, to tell me
the story of the marching band we hear now
rehearsing on the lawn under my office window?
Their drumbeat irresistible, I rock, I rock
you, side to side in my chair. Confined
to their tiny square of grass, the musicians
cannot march, so they are dancing.
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