JESSE BREITE
When I stuck my fist in the whiskery cage,
the crickets sang my skin alive.
BIO
Jesse Breite, native of Little Rock, Arkansas, currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Emily, and their two kids. Jesse’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Rhino, New Orleans Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Tar River Poetry, Ruminate, Anglican Theological Review and many other journals and magazines. He has been featured in Town Creek Poetry and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia. Breite has read for The Decatur Book Festival and The Georgia Poetry Society. His poem, “Space Odyssey,” was featured downtown as part of Elevate Atlanta 2012, and he has been a finalist in book prizes from The Texas Review Press, Red Mountain Press, Glass Lyre, and Mercer University Press. FutureCycle Press published his chapbook, The Knife Collector, in 2013. He was also an associate poetry editor for The Kentucky Review and Good Works Review. His first full-length book is forthcoming (Fall 2025) from Fernwood Press.
Breite started collaborating with Atlanta Composer Michael Kurth in 2015. Since then, he has written libretto for three of Atlanta Composer Michael Kurth’s scores, Magnificat, Tenebrae, and Miserere, the latter of which the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra performed in March 2018 and recorded in 2019 on the ASO’s album on Michael Kurth’s works, Everything Lasts Forever.
Currently, Jesse serves as English Department Chair at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta and has taught high school English for twenty years in Chicago, Baltimore, Asheville, and Atlanta. He is an award-winning teacher, has published on teaching practice in EdWeek Teacher, and has been awarded multiple summer study grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mercer University.
Image: "Foggy Path (monochrome). Two Rivers Park. Little Rock. 2019."
SELECT POEMS
"MAKE GOOD OF THE DEAD" — TOWN CREEK POETRY, FALL 2012
No one wants to say things about the boy
or the girl or the man because
the molded face in the open casket
is dead and looks dead.
We wander around the empty room
searching for old conversations we had
with the deceased, but it could be years
if we decide to dig up those bones.
Fir trees know how to make good of the dead
by fingering through softened, fibrous skin
(as if grasping for the heart)
and unabashedly growing up out of a corpse.
And who knows better than the moss,
that bejeweled, pubic robe crawling over
the naked trunk, crotch and limbs of the dead?
Moss, you second-skin, spell the bronze
stones of the earth into the fecund howl,
cracking forth, beaming—light (O God) into light.
"THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOLF" — TOWN CREEK POETRY, SPRING 2013
runs over spinal ridges. She’s been spotted
in Gentry, Rodgers, Bella Vista.
Tracks measured at five by four, her coming
and going, nakedly undetectable.
Overhead, a red-tailed hawk flies
as satellite to the most beautiful wolf.
Between is corn-dust, fiber-needle
mapping the air spiritual.
Gray blur gnawing into blue sky,
she moves liquid as dolphin-shadow.
Her hair grows of the old man’s nose;
her eyes gleam sun, puddle on a Magnolia leaf.
Her teeth strike, the flash of knives turning
into flesh: skin lacera and blood-swamp.
By each thorn-spur, you will sing her mercies.
THE KNIFE COLLECTOR, FUTURECYCLE PRESS — NOVEMBER 2013
“The Knife Collector is one of the most striking first collections I have read. His poems are clear-eyed and, often dreamlike, as they carry the reader through landscapes half-familiar while igniting something deeper than memory. Indeed, Breite’s work depends on the elemental just as much as it does biography—this is not a mere collection of anecdotes, but a poetry that works for all it can give, a set of truths made more believable and more significant via a masterful blending of the real and the mythic.”
—William Wright, senior editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology and author of Night Field Anecdote
"OZYMANDIAS, BORN AGAIN" — LIME HAWK REVIEW, SUMMER 2015
Walking the blue streets of Atlanta,
the old pavement curves
and writhes like a thick, glyphic skin.
Hardwood roots tentacle-up
from below and ripple the road
with convex dimples.
Electricity travels over our heads
through fat-bellied wires,
black snakes strung
by stripped posts. The air is heavy
with wireless radiation,
the dark human magic of signals
juicing up the cellular night,
the skyline’s neon blush.
I hold the hand of my lover,
and the city lights candy our eyes.
But the dirt is voracious,
and it will wait centuries for supper.
The stones know the monstrosity
of its patience, its quiver
and throb. Lord, this is what
we call forgiven: a dank, spindling
root swelling its tongues
in the darkness of dead bodies
that once coruscated
with bulbs of light, of light …
of artificial light.
"CRAZY MARY & THE SHARECROPPER'S SON" — CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, 2016
Maybe she thought that easy line—
Whatever you want to do is alright with me—
was for her, Mary Woodson White,
perhaps it was for her—the one who walked
into Al Green’s Memphis mansion,
to find her sometime lover on a Friday?
Maybe it was because four months earlier,
“Let’s Get Married” shot up the charts,
and she waited for a parallel lyric,
something more than the skinny shirtless man
pulling a fantasy gun on Greatest Hits ’75?
Whatever moved her, it must’ve been
a torrid spell—only got by scalding grits
flung on his back while he settled in a warm tub
and by a bullet, right then, to her own head—
and it must’ve been hell enough to drop him
to his knees at his sharecropper daddy’s church,
to raise him up in the Full Gospel Tabernacle
for the rest of his free-born days—how
the last words she wrote—The more I trust you,
the more you let me down—became the one
note he could never choose to give up.
"BIERSTADT'S LAST BUFFALO, 1888" — SPILLWAY, SUMMER 2017
Soon, he will be forgotten—
he knows this
because he revels
in the colors of awe—ultramarine,
lush vermillion,
because his bigness has gone out of style,
because he bristles
every canvas with luminescence.
So his last was less theatrical:
See the buffalo—bearded, stout,
low to the ground,
dying with arrows in his back—
each a long, sharp stroke,
and the crowned horns shimmering.
And the Comanche advances,
feathered spear aloft—
bringing a new aesthetic
to the shadowed river valley.
His band’s oncoming wave—dusty,
savage-bright, manifest.
Both opposite radical sleep.
The white horse rears over
vivid skulls glistening like pearls!
Maybe Bierstadt wished to live on
in his vast blue sky—carnal,
revelatory, marbled with clouds—
never ceasing in a single painting.
I can see him sitting down, sketching it out,
closing the eye of the buffalo
and elk, raising the cry
of the forlorn Native, and far off
in time, the buzzards—little angelic wisps
from those blue prisms—
coming to chew sleep again into light.
"HELM" — TERRAIN, MAY 2018
"LIFTED" — NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, 2018
"FISHING THE CADDO" — RUMINATE, WINTER 2019
We never owned a boat, but we dreamed
of boats when we dipped our hands
in the river. My father taught me to stand,
to gaze into water. On the banks
we waited for something, but it wasn’t a boat.
We knew that it went into the water,
that it would come out, that the black Nissan
truck drove hard, snarled on the route.
Dad flipped his wrist, taught me to throw
a little tooth with invisible line
to invisible water, that it could grow weight.
The spears we held gave us a language
we wrote in the air. As we sat, Dad pulled
worms from dirt, fit them to the hook.
If you set it right, he said, there is no pain—
not for the worm, not for the fish.
When I stuck my fist in the whiskery cage,
the crickets sang my skin alive.
And still we waited—what we pulled
from the river was the river—liquid muscle,
speckled with our fingertips. Some fish
transfigured in the sunlight. We held them
as long as we could before giving them back.
"ABSTRACTED STOOD" — RHINO, APRIL 2020
“and for the time remained stupidly good” - Paradise Lost, Book IX
Always a pause before the dazzle
after the brink, a blank.
The thing that awes you, stuns you,
plants the wow in your mouth.
Always the space before what comes,
departs. The line is where
you sign your name. Threshold,
your choice. The fruit
you juice—what curls your tongue.
Say what you saw, saw what you can
right down through the eye
of the wood, the pith of the trunk.
But it’s lost as soon as you find
the beauty of beauty’s invisible
bridges. Call it the wind
that hides you, the breeze
that forgives. Call it the sky blue
sky that proceeds, finishes
through feeling, hinge of
the marvelous—what opens
what closes. Call it the woman’s face—
the one you love or the one
you hardly know, that leaves you
dumbstruck, stupid-good
before what happens next.
"FRIDGE DELIVERY" — FOURTEEN HILLS, 2020
They held that weight like grief,
and it bounced on an elastic tongue
strung between them, belted
waist to waist. The defrosted
metal closet slid back on the belly
of the one behind, and the one ahead
gritted his golden teeth. They moved
in sync, arms holding the slightest
shift, dancing from truck ramp
up the hill to unhinged door frame.
Their breathing swift as horses,
hearty as trains. In such toil, what
haven’t they conquered? No one
would call it grief—this loosening
of their bodies—not yet, not now—
cloaked as they are in daylight.
"HOW WE BREATHE" — 12 MILE REVIEW, SPRING 2022
Dandelions blaze small fires in spring.
My son wanders the yard to discover
one after another. I hold the bloom
burnt up to a little white ball and blow
the feathered seeds—the fuzzy parachutes
catch, swing soft missiles through the wind
to leave them in the ivy. I imagine how
a germ spreads in silence to meet our
fingers, lips, our eyes. How we breathe—
And my son sees not the seed, the germ,
but the beauty of the drift. For such
motion, he will seek out each square inch
of green, ask in his stumbling English if
we can Do it again. And to fan his wonder,
all I can say is Here, over here.
FOUR POEMS — SUBNIVEAN, SEPTEMBER 2022 (ISSUE 6/EPISODE 2 Podcast)
"THE AMERICAN STYLE" — NIGHTINGALE & SPARROW, FEBRUARY 2023
"ODE TO THE SPHERE" — RIVER HERON REVIEW, SUMMER 2023
THREE POEMS — PLANT-HUMAN QUARTERLY, WINTER 2024
LIBRETTO
MAGNIFICAT BY MICHAEL KURTH, 2016
Libretto Excerpt by Jesse Breite
And now, my breath breaks on the name of God,
to seek, find, redefine the broken time.
I delight the loam, the long, cold-cracked road,
where I am ever-born and tendril-sweet.
Recall my life, old ringed world,
my blood-red Lord bright in these limbs
and flourishing still.
Libretto Excerpt by Jesse Breite
Movement V., starting at 15:35
I stood alien at the crossroad,
unjarred my mouth,
held forth my hand, but none knew my name.
How I grew weak, touch-broke and needful
under the hurt-tree.
My eyes raked the pavement for scraps
and swallowed.
My bones unbuckled and leaked.
My heart bled vinegar.
None read the sacred verse of my skin.
None unsaddled my sorrowful limbs.
MISERERE BY MICHAEL KURTH, 2018
Libretto by Jesse Breite
V.
You must first look past
the little corpses, the useless limbs,
the clown-faced fools
who wear your name, the calcified
pressures of shame.
You must stage the terrible romance
over your eyes, cut out
the tongues of the poor,
unsee widows, orphans
dropping coin into kettles.
Stuff the shorn heads with silver—
silver tongues, silver eyes,
silver-sweet hellos and goodbyes.
Reach your hand in, brush against God-flesh.
Tear the freshly broken bread.
How can you account
the cost, looking back before you scry?
How can you doubt
your own satisfactions when the sun
drops like a circular
saw into the earth’s tired face—
its keen blades searing the great rolling eye?
VII.
Gimme the broke skin,
metal thorned wrist and foot,
blood volcanic wound-core—
its purple tongue-swell,
the hurt curtains draping
the face with sweat and gore
Gimme the flesh filleted by cheers,
the wood turnt on the horizon,
the cut wet stuck to these fingers,
the ooze of adoration lost,
the shame-murmuring shadows,
the heartless fist of angels,
body wretched of all feeling
Gimme the sinister air,
the voice emptied of its
gravelly depths, the buzzed-
grass burnt hill,
the prickled skull spotted red
and achey with lack
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