I’d like to discuss this matter with the heroine of the piece,
but she has gone stolid and silent despite my entreaties.
Her pale eyes glisten with resentment.
She grieves the loss of a future so vividly imagined
it was like a living thing,
a bundle of soft fur:
a mink, say, or a ferret.
Andrea Jackson‘s fiction and poetry have appeared in various journals, most recently in Alligator Juniper (contest finalist; reprinted in Phone-Fiction.com), Meadowland Review, and Postcard Poems and Prose. She has received two Pushcart nominations and one nomination for the Best of the Net Anthology, and has an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is working on a biography/memoir based on her mother’s letters.
A Quiet Courage 