Known Affliction by Letitia Jiju

Associate poetry editor Andrew Walker on this week’s bonus poem: Using short, quick verse, Letitia Jiju crafts a disruptive poem that rattles earth in every syllable. Each of the 14 expertly-crafted lines shakes the reader so heavily, at the end, we can’t help but dissolve like salt in water.

Known Affliction

for Goofy

The first tremor is unperceived.
When I loved, I loved.

Quiet on the Richter scale.
When it came to it, I was unstinting

in the same hard want
that salted Lot’s wife. Voracious

in my dissolving. Such abandon
even in the mote is natural

for the salt who disappears fully
       when wet. It is plausible

I ripped the isotrope.
Shook its neat perpendiculars.

The Dead Sea is said to have tipped over
that night like a hiccup. I was incredulous for you.

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Letitia Jiju has work published/forthcoming in PRISM International, trampset, ANMLY, Moist Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She reads poetry for Psaltery & Lyre. Find her on Instagram/Twitter @eaturlettuce.

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