Job's wife brings store-bought cookies
- Job's wife brings store-bought cookies
to the school bake sale, hard plasticnesting inside softer plastic.First, a rustle and thenthe incoherent snap of shameas a better mom plopslemon drops and thumbprints markedwith actual thumbs. They allhave KitchenAids, apple redand stainless. Job's wife has a whiskand aches from sliding a safetypin into sores to open pustulesall night. She feeds her childrenfrozen waffles every morningand listens to the momsrattle off reading lists and swimmingfeats when all she has taughther children is how to want.In a rented room lit by a milk jugflush against a flashlight she stuffsher pillows with wadded tissuesand grieves over everyone else'sgrief, wet and unending. Job's wife knowshow a shadow can stretch, how waterand light and sand can takethe shape of almost anything,even a small hand tuggingat a body gone dry. [End Page 122]
Jaclyn Dwyer has published stories, essays, and poems in a number of literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Pleiades, Witness, Indiana Review, Electric Literature, and Salon. She received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction to attend the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She earned a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University, where she received a Kingsbury Fellowship. Her full-length poetry collection, The Bride Aflame, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in April 2019. She lives in Ohio with her husband and daughters where she is at work on a novel.
