JANE (1976)

She took the advice of a woman she met on the bus. She needed eggs and a chicken to be with a man she had lost to another. She never expected it would be her brother. She bought the necessary black candle and covered it in salt and poppy seeds. She chanted a melodic prayer and moved to the groove.

She did this for thirteen days tossing eggs and bones into the East River every night at 3 am. She waited and waited to be put back together with the man she’d lost for the second time.

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by Ruben Quesada

Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems. His writing appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kirkus Review, and Harvard Review. He has served as an editor for AGNI, PANK, The Rumpus, and Pleiades and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles and for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.