Jessica Goodfellow
Winter 2026 | Poetry
Rock Tumbler
One of the projects my parents bought to distract my brother from the life he ended
up choosing anyway. From the basement we could hear the small motor straining
to keep a barrel of rocks spinning, clunking. Sometimes the smell of smoke snuck up
the stairs, but we didn’t panic. It was one engine we knew how to cool down.
What we placed in the barrel: water, grit, and raw rocks to be shaken, scraped,
ground, until cracks, rough edges, and uneven patches—all the imperfections—
were smoothed into a shine we almost could see our reflections in. A friction machine,
like the ever-changing litany of flaws our parents aimed to buff out of us.
Nearly clear in color, one polished rock had trapped inside itself a tiny forest
of miniature evergreens. I turned it over in my hand so often my brother gave it to me.
Long after he was sent away, sent away again, then locked away, I kept it.
Moss agate, I learned it’s called. What my parents kept: their photos of us, frozen
as toddlers—doe-eyed, plump, presentable—simpering at the camera for their sanction.
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had work in the Beloit Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. Jessica is an American poet living in Japan.