Jenny

A Production of the YSU Student Literary Arts Association

Why We Prefer Not To Trust the Ground

by Gabriel Welsch


The ice catches my wheel
when I park in the private lot
where I chase the person
I think I could be
once a week.

The ground messes
with my head as do the windows
in old houses,
glass thicker
at the base of the pane.

The tire wobbles
and makes earth uncertain
and my breath pause
before catching again
to stop the car.

What scam is solidity.
Ice and its unyielding slip,
dirt holding the water
and air necessary
for the thrust of a turgid stalk.

Two birds rest in mute
telepathy on one side of a cross
at the apex of the oldest
church still upright and
poking at a low-slung heaven.

Consider the self so thin
our atomic fiber
lets through energy
as we stride so sure—
electrical sieves.                                                         

In the town where my feet
slip on the ground
I do not know there is
a wish to dig and strike a root
where it cannot be seen.


Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems: The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, The Death of Flying Things, An Eye Fluent in Gray, and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor. His work has appeared widely, in journals including Ploughshares, Southern Review, THRUSH, Harvard Review, Moon City Review, Lake Effect, Missouri Review, as well as on Verse Daily and in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry.” Welsch lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.


About Jenny

Jennymag.org is the online literary magazine of the Student Literary Arts Association at Youngstown State University. It’s our yearly collection of our favorite written work and photography from Youngstown and from around the world.

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