How many stairs must I climb,
how many tiles must I count
in Moroccan palaces,
before I outnumber you?
I translate dirhams to dollars,
list door handle types in the medina,
pull pomegranate seeds by the dozen,
waiting for new memories
to outweigh the old,
to overlay the mosaic
of my senses that you
left behind, enticing me
like a maze I cannot
afford to get lost in.
Jeana Jorgensen studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn her PhD in folklore from Indiana University. She currently teaches at Butler University and researches gender and sexuality in fairy tales and fairy-tale retellings, folk narrative more generally, body art, dance, sex education, and feminist/queer theory. While most of her time goes to teaching college courses and publishing research on the above, she has recently returned to writing fiction and poetry. Her poetry has appeared at Strange Horizons, Liminality, Wyrd & Wyse, Glittership, Stone Telling, Enchanted Conversation, and Mirror Dance. She blogs at Patheos and is constantly on Twitter.