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JESSE BREITE

November 2024: 3 Poems w/audio (scroll down) -- South Florida Poetry Journal

"Highway 9" for Little Rock -- Slant Journal of Poetry

"Siphonal Mouth" -- Rockvale Review

Foggy Path (monochrome). Two Rivers Park

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 and has published on teaching practice in EdWeek Teacher. Jesse has also 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 

Poetry Chapbook

“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.

RHINO Vision Reading

"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, Summer 2024

TWO POEMS One Art, Summer 2024

"Stone Fire Root Vespers" Tinderbox Poetry,  Summer 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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