LitBreak Magazine Suite: 4 Poems
Jessie’s first published suite of poetry. As seen in Litbreak Magazine May 23, 2022.
Flamethrower
I read a meme
that said If in Texas
they’re going to put you in
jail for having an abortion, you
might as well kill your rapist. Do
you think Medusa cast men as moments
in time, plastering them in a rage of tiny
figurines, action heroes with which to play
out her trauma? Did each snake remember
every time that she was slighted, passed over,
passed on, or punished unjustly? Did they whisper
in her ear
You’ll catch more flies with honey / Honey, you were asking for
it / It’s just what men do / Do you want to die alone?
Do you feel the flame swelling, do you notice how
the blue burn of pain quickens and fans into red fury,
then sputters and dies down again into embers of sharp
splinters that we swallow grudgingly? Who doesn’t
have a body full of matchsticks, kindling bits
latent under thunder, ready for the dry
flash of lightning that will ignite a
reckoning blaze, and what
is wrong with them?
Johannes Vermeer – Girl With A Pearl Earring
How overstimulated and highly irritated that mollusk must have been.
Did some playboy slurp it? Eyebrow raised in come hither Aphrodite
then fondle the pearl with tongue tied confusion, only to spit up
a jewel the size of a cherry tomato, was it Vermeer? and did he attach
a fish hook to lure an oyster-eyed maid with a watery stare? Piercing
the ear and the bosom at once, he wrapped her in a turban projecting
something more (exotic) onto her, and folding layers of conquest
in wheat and water, taking extra care with her whetted lips, sharpened
by the stone. Do we admire the crack lacquer and praise the light
because he was male, and because he was white?
The perspective of conquerors pervades the canon like cannon fodder,
the gaze heavy on the round who’ve been iron-forged and pressed by
test after test, balls for blasting and blowing and throwing
over, unhuman but blessed with breasts. He was born in a bubble
of tulipina mania, two lips to the bulb. Beauty worth more than gold
in Delft he was deft at teasing riches from lead-tin yellow
what’s good for the gander is good for the guilder. A life spangled
with gilt, unknown surfaces lurking underneath ultramarine underpaint
obscura by faint flurries of pearly light, chromatic aberrations like halos
bestowed by papal decree. Decry the master! Muster your forces of daily
shucking, paint yourself among the barnacled beds made untidy and leaning
by love and by dreaming.
Crazing Cracked
They tell us to *fight aging* as if
we should punch (our own) faces, cocky
for a schoolyard fight with a winner and a
loser. As if the wrinkling time and wizening
signs are something to hide behind a faltering
youth, as if the only thing worth showing
is the smooth dumbness of baby skin. But
cucumber eyes can’t see. The arm of life that unwinds
with heavy gifts each year, fingers finally revealing
the kernels like opal seeds in the palm, is not
a thing
to tie
behind
your back.
Unless, like an armless marble relic, you
crave the frozen flats, mask of many a young
death. Is it not a tremendous triumph to
make it to old age?
Walking still on bent legs? Despite the stiff back, sore
from all the bending?
Despite all the hitting and kicking and wind
knocking out like a robber at the door?
To make it. It being
breathing
and nothing more.
Maybe aging is more like a bath. It feels hot
at first, it burns the bum and sitting feels prickly and
squeezing like a sponge of sweat. But oh,
once you lean in, the wrapping water washes all the care
from tense shoulders wilting with expectations. Lavender and salt
swirl fat with fucks shed from fleshy arms and thick middles.
The scalp lathers with loosened fear. And the perfect face,
both puffed and hollow, crazing with the crackles of a
pottery glazed and well-fired …the face floats.
Dragon
I
hold
the banister
of grief as I fall
down the stairs of
living without your
touch, your laughing
tears hot on bacon cheeks
wheezing, dimpled with the
stars of mother love that make us
all feel shiny and best. The special gifts
left at the feet of knowing like a lasso hunting,
strong with the pull of memories bathed in recurring
deaths, selves shed while ebullient births midwived by
your hands wriggled wet as truths, fresh to my young eyes.
Zodiac dragon and I, your egg. You watched me as the sun rose
in my hair like lavender tulle, all taut and gathered by your sewing
machine to make a tutu for dancing pas de deux. Your scent was round
like a watermelon and we ate the seeds too. Your favorite form of charity
was giving blood, and I wonder who is walking now, with you inside their
veins. A roiling emptiness from lash to tip growls between my muscles. How will
you tell me? Tell me, how can I be a mother without the grandness of your heaping heart?
An apartment child
doesn’t have a backyard
to her it’s just out that we
go, our daily sojourn to the
hills, there are no seeds pressed
to loam, no uncurl of slip n slide,
revolver of sprinkler tag, but
she knows the names of the
trees, to thank them, we
have our potted plants
our rooms within rooms
she knows how to go inside
how to light a candle
in case of emergency
