Author Archives: Jenny

  The water element she builds in the back yard resembles a sarcophagus.   A terrier owned by a neighborhood widower falls in and drowns.   A frog lives in the water element. She fishes him out in spring to … Read More

  I watched the film slumped unaware of watching our own film that was also made of skin and light, like before when the glass particles that shattered in midsummer suddenly revealed all the vertices of his body that I … Read More

  The whole sky is hunched. An intransitive thirst.   Talking a foreign language is like wearing borrowed clothes.   Helga confuses the words for land and landscape (who would you be in another language?)   You show me my … Read More

  Three body bags of crumpled plastic and extension cords trail like entrails spilling beside the doublewide of Art and Esther who plot our holiday into full (af)frontal curbside pageant, and in case you hadn’t   noticed other harbingers: snowblowers … Read More

  My processor is stuck. I need tea. I want a human on the other end of the phone, not some asphalt envelope voice that says I’m a vegetable.   Did I have breakfast? Did I have surgery? The leaves … Read More

  I might have been born to write your elegy. The moment I lift my pen your soft knock will be heard at the door. For fifty years or more you have been my work-in-progress.   *   I know … Read More

        (1)       The Wyndham Sisters       John Singer Sargent, 1899   Cream-colored, both the plush brocade-covered couch       where two sit and their gowns, the satin, the gauze     … Read More

  The pounding begins / like the old war drums / in my ears. I can   hear your heart / as you watch me / from outside my exhibit: /   “Endangered.” As if it could have ended / … Read More

  Make me the copper sun of Golgotha, the shivering of the sperm whale just       after mating. Make me the coupling link cuffing your shirt, one of a pair, as if the length      of the … Read More

  Everyone will be your love at the church bazaar, at the psychic fair where we have arrived too late, and the fortune tellers have become annoyed by questions and predict only death and disaster despite Gypsy tradition. No one … Read More

  False labor, a fist binding my womb to your skin to your ribs to your heart, and it feels not like practice to have you out   but a hardening will to keep you in, the way you might … Read More

  The summer I was born—was it yesterday?—God stopped thinking,   stopped moss from clinging to stones, threw his hands up, wouldn’t listen   to the hummingbirds, nor other animals wailing in the brush. He waited for me   to … Read More