Jade Ramsey holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University; author of Yawns Between Strangers, her poems and stories can be found in The MacGuffin, Juked, Best New Poets 2013, Whiskey Island, and many others. You can find her at jaderamseyauthor.com.
The Book of Legend
All our fists are china that reserved china for important guests unaware how breakable we are the unraveling inevitable dinners with meals so meticulous the spinach woven into alfredo gorgonzola from scratch not burned in fires in ovens in lightning storms not drowning in wheat fields with poison tares waiting waiting we are the ex-rays of tulips infected with ourselves with the hope of some treasure buried in the midst of scarred trees hash marks like third degree brandings somewhere out there is a soldier dying telling his nurse his family secret that he is the last and someone must travel to Texas to dig up a chest of Spanish Doubloons funeraled in the ground by Catholics before an American Indian raid in the 17th century but this story is cloudy and all that’s found by my eighteen-year-old PaPa in 1928 is a horsehair pouch that crumbles like an old tea cup in his one whole hand