Jacqueline Berger

New Year’s Day

I don’t like when you act
like me—the ah, well
of our late start,
nearly dusk and the opal
of the lake a ghostly smear.
I don’t like when you don’t know
any more than I do.
Why I can’t trust
my own authority
is a question
I shelf for now.
Now the moon
swings up over the trees.
Deep mud after the rains
and we’re circling,
not lost, but still looking.
You part branches
and I bend beneath.

Girls are laughing
in the dark.
Those are coyotes
you tell me. 
Then there are girls,
three, with headlamps,
coming toward us
with light pouring
from their foreheads.
They know the way
and we follow
a few paces behind
to not interrupt
the story of a roommate
that one of them is telling.

They lead us out of the woods
then head off to their car,
casual wave, 
and we to a Mexican restaurant,
long tables of families,
and order margaritas
and combo plates
and forget our wet feet.
The girls are an omen
and I believe
for a minute
though the state will soon
murder a poet
then a nurse
that this year will be different
than the last.

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Jacqueline Berger is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Left at the Ruin (Terrapin Books, 2024). Her earlier books include The Day You Miss Your Exit (Broadstone Books, 2018), The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize judged by Alicia Ostriker, Things That Burn, selected by Mark Strand for the 2004 Agha Shahid Ali Prize and The Mythologies of Danger, chosen by Alberto Ríos as the 1998 Bluestem Award winner. Berger’s poems have appeared on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and in numerous anthologies and journals, including The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Old Dominion Review, River Styx, Rattle and Nimrod. She is professor emerita of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California and lives on the California Central Coast.