Looking into those eyes made me feel like I have been walking too fast my whole life.
The day we spoke for the first time felt like a birthday, and we ourselves were the gifts, to be opened again and again.
When I found out she liked chocolate-dipped honeycomb, I wanted to give her cocaine and beehives to see if she liked to live dangerously.
We put our shoes together to see who had bigger feet and realized we wanted to know everything that was unknowable before, how we are the same, how we are different, and if life mattered more to us now than before.
My lips are the same size as her ear, and her nose could fit in my belly button; we wonder if lions could resist eating zebras if they knew we are all connected by such intricate similarities and if the whole world could love if they knew about our discovery.
From: Chainsawsmoking: Poems Wrapped in Cellophane
Summary
“jigsaw” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on love and relationships. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
Analysis
Voice
A personal, first-person speaker combines recollection with direct emotional address.
Style and form
The poem is expansive, first-person. Its brevity concentrates attention on juxtaposition, line breaks, and the pressure created by what the poem leaves unstated.
Themes and imagery
Its strongest thematic currents include love and relationships. Concrete images give those abstractions physical weight, while changes in diction and pace keep the poem from settling into a single emotional register.
Reading the poem
A productive way to read “jigsaw” is to watch how its images change function as the poem progresses. Details that initially establish scene or memory become emotional evidence. The result is a poem whose argument is carried through association, rhythm, and image as much as through explicit statement.
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Source & rights
Source: Chainsawsmoking: Poems Wrapped in Cellophane (Lawn Gnome Publishing, 2016)
Rights: © 2016 Lawn Gnome Publishing. All rights reserved.