Author: Jackie Pick

Jackie Pick is a former teacher and current writer living in the Chicago area. She is a contributing author to multiple anthologies, including Multiples Illuminated, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood, Here in the Middle, as well as the and the literary magazines The Sun and Selfish. She received Honorable Mention from the Mark Twain House and Museum for her entry in the Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Competition. Jackie is a contributing writer at Humor Outcasts, and her essays have been featured on various online sites including McSweeney's, Belladonna Comedy, Mamalode, The HerStories Project, and Scary Mommy. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Jackie is co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning short film Fixed Up, and a proud member of the 2017 Chicago cast of Listen To Your Mother.

Post Beat

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Jackie Pick's avatarJackie Pick

I think I would have been a beat poet
Or a protest singer
Soul rubbed raw by reality scraping against idealism and truth.
Sharing in verse hope and pain. Not just mine —
Others may need a beat poet or a protest singer
To use the pen or the pick as a mirror and balm.

And we would sing or read or rap or march or plan or reaffirm,
Upsetting status quo gently or roughly by the shoulders with Art Revolution.
Meeting, laughing, growling
Gathering new friends or the merely curious
in coffee shops or untidy close apartments or even someone’s unironically beautiful beach home.
We would mark these times with great output and remember them decades later looking at black and white photos of ourselves that no one remembers being taken while we sang and spoke of change.

But I am not a beat poet
Or a protest singer.

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