Jess’s Inkwellings

Dear Odessa, when I hear the refrain
Of you crashing down stair by stair, afraid
To fall, more so to need, I vow again
To get off my ass and come to your aid.

Bent on your outing, hunkered, your arm wrapped
Back like a flightless bird, four flights explain
Your fate to you daily. I watch, and that’s,
Dear Odessa, when I hear the refrain

Of your life, a song you know but can’t name.
A girl with straight braids and spine. Your pop made
Moonshine. On a Sunday (“All rise”), all came
Crashing down. Stair by stair, he fell, afraid

Of the fire, sloppily quitting himself.
Then, in that decade of Kool-Aid and strained
Smiles, your husband left. You cursed yourself
For falling, for needing; “I vow” again

A gimmick you should have known better than.
You’ve seen wars, seen boys die for shams, for shame.
You’ve seen millions wait for this sea-locked land
To gets of its ass and come to their aid.

This doing nothing, this life at low grade
Isn’t the root of evil, but the rain
And sun. The least I can do is to wade
Through the muck of conscience and make my way
To you, by now halfway down, Odessa.

Now I lay me down to steep
In the hot cup of counted sheep.
If I should die here for God’s sake,
I’ll know my soul made a mistake.

If my prayer could snag the cloth of his thought
And pull a pucker through all creation,
I’d be satisfied of his existence and mine
In the broken lake of his concentration.

It hurts, my lord, in the Ziploc beneath my bra
Where keeps my raw meat seat of emotion,
Iced pieces cleaving off.

It is what it is what it is and I’m no exception,
Just a holed-up, humpbacked narrator, my child.
That’s your cross to bury, now dig on and let me be.
Let me be, let me be.

Now I swim myself to sleep
Through a network of graves to the waters deep.
If I should drown in God’s great wake,
Let my seaglass soul be his keepsake.

Wisecrack, smarts less cause I hash and rehash
Mon esprit d’escalier. I’m the one who runs
Back up the stairs.

Diminished, I dwell
In the slightest cell–and on–I’m sorry–
The least misspell and the smallest slight.
Which in this light, casts Plato’s puppet show.
There is a sun like a goat eye. This crack is wise
To all my murmurings but doesn’t tell.
Whatever softness is behind it, I’ve kissed.
I cannot tell.

There is love in here, but no trust.
Sudden, chest-soaking sentiment
For dust, and choking up, and lust.

Choke, choke, sputter. I’ve spent the last couple months nosing through a haystack of poems and chatting up the needles. And I haven’t written a thing myself. Some babble to warm up again:

Windswept, the wishbone, and whistling whistling,
Slept. Again the trombone, again with the drum.
Swept, mopped and put to bed: the desert,
the desert resting in bed.
The crows, onetwo overhead, themselves in auguration.
The onetwo punch of daybreak and dusk,
the routine to rise to bed.
Earlybirds, two, overheard, breaking into each other before work:
Hot theft. Short shrift:
The lesser half of the wishbone. Theft and thrift and
Rest. The sand expanse.
Settled: the sand, the land and our matters.
The trom the bone and goodbye.

xeno,

my roommate smells really good. well then here is my riddle: on the Ash + 2, when the children in China are dining, I will come with a piano-played letter, a gardenward intent and a gore-coaxing, sterile instrument. I will wake you in my gentle way, coldhanded but not underhanded. have some medicine for me, will you! there is the reason I have shunned it: it is an admission of defeat; it is asking for help. now, that match you lit has impregnated me, as you predicted, and I am going to nurse the heart-ulus in my belly. ah well there were already many things growing in me, right fecund one?

xeno

If February is a genetically perfect child, all these kids have one hiccupped guanine (they were born on the 29th):
bruin, febrile, ebb, rue, brewery, brouhaha, Ryan, feeble, err, airy, fibrillate, ruin, fury, fairy

And together they make something ugly, too:

On a four post bed dies Ryan, febrile.
Four walls fold around him, break his fever.
The fates ensure their darling wins the day,
Shoveling snow on the whole damn endeavor.
He ebbs and rues, forgets and flows.
Death airs out the truth like ale does, but
The workings of a brewery are beyond those who benefit.
Moments of ruin, moments of fury emerge
From an unknown mental machine and fake their course.

The bruin is long since gone, from the scent of its print
And the state of the fairy dead in it.
A child errs from track to track, trying on his mother’s shoes.

Here she is, mumbling the nostoi
About the wrath—but no, not only wrath—
About the man of many minds.
About the many marks on her neck.

Leaning, telling, she dozes. As if a rat
Chewed her wiry neck, she flickers
On and off. Alert and asleep. Joking and cursing herself.
“He’s sweet sometimes,” she mocks,
But knowing you’re a common case
Does next to nothing to undo it.

Busy making busy-making coffee,
Her arm muscles mouse under worn leather.
She’s got that little-lady toughness,
The deep voice in a taut drum.
But she flickers. She slows and swallows and
The saliva over the live wire makes her wince.
Resume: brewing blouses and folding coffee
And insisting that I have a sip.

Sobs, soft lozenges of sobs
Soothe her shortcircuiting throat.
Strange: pure exhaust from the heart,
No trace of the crying-fuel of thought.
I find her in the bathroom, head on the sink.
My hand on her shoulder: “I didn’t know I was asleep.”

Four poems have been removed while they take a 4-8 week vacation in sunny Slushpile, USA.

Hey, look over here! It’s a list of 2007’s most popular baby names.

Amorpha quachitensis - Ouachita leadplant
Amorpha paniculata - Panicled indigobush
Astragalus soxmaniorum - Soxmans’ milk-vetch
Calamagrostis porterissp insperata - Ofer hollow reed grass
Carex decomposita - Epiphytic sedge
Carex latebracteata - Waterfall’s sedge
Castanea pumila var. ozarkensis - Ozark chinquapin
Chelone obliqua var. speciosa - Rose turtlehead
Cyperus grayoides - Umbrella sedge
Delphinium treleasei - Trelease’s larkspur
Dodecatheon frenchii - French’s shootingstar
Draba aprica - Open-ground whitlow-grass
Echinacea paradoxa - Bush’s yellow coneflower
Eriocaulon kornickianum - Small-headed pipewort
Fothergilla major - Witch-alder
Helianthus occidentalis ssp. plantagineus - Shinner’s sunflower
Hydrophyllum brownei - Browne’s waterleaf
Liatris squarrosa var. compacta - A blazing star
Mespilus canescens - Stern’s medlar
Minuartia godfreyi - Godfrey’s sandwort
Neviusia alabamensis - Alabama snow-wreath
Polymnia cossatotensis - Cossatot leafcup
Schoenolirion wrightii - Texas sunnybell
Scutellaria bushii - Bush’s skullcap
Silene regia - Royal catchfly
Streptanthus squamiformis - A twistflower
Trillium pusillum var. ozarkanum - Ozark least trillium
Valerianella nuttallii - Nuttall corn-salad
Vernonia lettermannii - Narrowleaf ironweed
Carya ovata - Shagbark Hickory
Sassafras albidum - Sassafras
Liquidambar styraciflua - Sweetgum
Rhus typhina - Staghorn Sumac
Prunus virginiana - Chokecherry

(better later) 

She sensed the absence, since the accident,
Of an element of her face, crucial,
Maybe a cuticle, milk curd like,
That kept things as one, and in.

The movements of society, she squinted at
Through a two-way glass, able unto act.
Unable to hand to arm, eye to eye
Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
Paying attention; deflecting recompense.

Stumped, she stole a break from cracking circles
(For none were willing to admit).
Outside at last, the cold relief.
Alone at last, together anon.

And-on and-on: the magpie’s here
On broken branch in cold relief.
The tree can’t help but to unleaf.
The magpie can’t (won’t) help her there.

Dismal implitude of night;
The measured hearts and heights of fright.
The soldiers’ row beats even still,
And on enough the limpwing’s mill.

The faeries’ Copenhagen mines
Fill in barefoot in wet climes.
And every Copenhagen street
Is forced to counterfeit its meat.

Pale fire, produce the paradox
That’ll pry the womb and coax the fox
And clear the milky diomede
That pauses, leaps, and supercedes.

Oh on down, on down the hill
The rara avis posts his bill
And halts the rolling, broken jack,
And heals him, and detests him still.