Jill Pearlman, in the Ocean State Review

Uncanny

The baby was quite
simply there;
a thing as a star
or a tree is
unto herself.
Miraculous
enough to rest
by herself on a shelf
with ink and paint
indelible—
to survive without milk.

Day two:
she wowed me
with words on
her lips—uter-
ine heard
lyric in full
sentences. Day

three. I
swear standing
there she flowered
eye to eye
with me in neon
pink flush
with liquid life
reading to me
from a book.

Jill Pearlman on “Uncanny“:

The baby in “Uncanny” could be a newborn or a poem—it tracks the amazement we bring to a creation  that we’ve had little or nothing to do with! The baby (who in literal reading is my artist-daughter) seemed to arrive fully formed years ago. One liminal night I realized that the adult child she’d become was also beyond me, and the poem slipped out.

That I had trusted this artist-child to come into her own always had risks—but creativity does wow. A poet is susceptible to her ecstasies, no matter how grounded they are. The risks, in retrospect, can make one quake. The poem’s condensed bits have references to the outside world—to the art supply cabinet in our kitchen, to a legend in Torah, to my mythologies of my early days. Since I feel I barely wrote this, I can say it’s one of my favorites—mysterious, lyrical, almost mystical. 

Jill Pearlman is a Providence-based poet whose work explores ecstasy in the decentered self and world. Her poems wander the world restlessly as impatient travelers. “L’Eau and Behold,” an extended sequence, was recently short-listed in La Piccioletta Barca. Her work has appeared in OSR, Salamander, Barrow Street, The Common (upcoming), Nixes Mate and Indicia.  She has produced several multimedia poetry series: “Trees Road Vertigo,” documenting the fate of plane trees in France, and “Mirrors, a conversation with Avivah Zornberg.”  She posts work at jillpearlman.com and on X.