White Center, 1950

Genre: Poetry

The figs, arranged in                still life,
              as if by Chardin’s                   quiet violence;
                         the house exists to hold them.

Bruised bodies beaded         dark wet,
               glisten pressed to                  porcelain in this
                           astonished kitchen                  whiteness, this
                                                       bewildered daybreak rose.

We know just by                    looking how
               the mouth will form             around them,
                            the subtle shape                                    of promise
                                            and of fleeting tongue-burst flesh.

Author Photo

Jared Green is an author, screenwriter, and professor of English literature at Stonehill College. His poetry has appeared in Tiny Seed and his fiction in Quiddity, The Write Launch, The Stardust Review, and The New Limestone Review. He has also published scholarship on modernist literature and early cinema in numerous peer-reviewed journals and anthologies in the US, France, and Canada. He was a finalist for the 2019 Gurney Norman Fiction Prize and has been recognized by the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing with a 2019 MVICW Fellowship and by the state of Rhode Island with a Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship.