Jules Jacob

Abrus precatorius
Rosary Pea

I present men palming
shelled rosary peas and love

beads, stringing ten decades
of Hail Marys preceded

by Our Fathers hawking
rose gardens of prayers.

No amount of Glory Bes
can stop their heavy sweating.

I present luster-stripped
women walled-in al hadiqa

il giardino and le jardin,
coral beads dressing throats

and wrists, able to kill flea
or mambo by exhaling the grace

of subdued women, breath
noxious as prisoners in isolation.

Julie “Jules” Jacob is a contemporary poet who often writes about dichotomous conditions and relationships between humans and the natural world. Her work appears or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies including Plume Anthology 8, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Plume, Frogpond, and elsewhere. She’s the author of The Glass Sponge with select poems featured at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s Le Moulin à Nef in France. Visit julesjacob.com