Author Archives: Jenny

  It is to be born into a fragile garden between today’s rain and my left brain   where the artist hangs like one of these colorful characters with nowhere to go   around the Space Needle, shooting up while … Read More

  The snow carries the chill of Novocain, the dentist’s Latex fingers that taste of nothing. What Is the circumference of your absence? I play Jerry Butler And Otis Redding and sing along (badly)—because No one can hear me anyway. … Read More

  Tonight the full moon slips like a coin into God’s own pinball machine.   Auden called it a “clockwork spectacle.” Perhaps he was wrong—just once.   And Victorian Meredith thought its army “unalterable.”   Perhaps he was wrong as … Read More

  Riding out to the Coney Island end of the line, with a view to look into the third-story world I read about, I stop at Smith-9th   to frame with my SLR eroding enduring iron concrete trestle etcetera. From … Read More

Eros   —lord how the loved infuriate, the cat’s fangs in my petting hand, the fern in the fernery grey & limp as old kelp & the woman re-writing all the rules, unhiding everything. opening cupboards in my own house … Read More

  The way boiling water lives in fire Is how a cactus lives in the window. And how a tree runs underground, And how the sun sets over houses.   March ends. Snow in the yard Turns into black crows. … Read More

  I have been ridiculous: crying in the street, holding frozen spoons against my eyes, as if they could cure. Months pass with only cloud cover. Tonight, grief lacks the horizon hidden within it. I enter the backyard grove of … Read More

—for PJW   So gentle a man, yet so fierce a passion for poetry! I’ve known him to argue   for five minutes together against a misplaced comma or another poet’s ragged numbers.   No use quibbling: always he is … Read More

  The moon has left me, my love, but I have my boat.   And if my boat abandons me, my love, my body won’t.   Oh, it knows to float, my love, you’ll see.   Unless I am betrayed, … Read More

  She washed her hair with leşie she brewed at home by simmering ashes. She combed her hair in the sun with kerosene from the lamp. She wove her own skirts, catrinţe, and she bought one new pair of blue … Read More

  I used to sneak off with a folding chair down the hill, some evenings, to the edge of the inlet between lakes, and just sit there.   It was so quiet I could hear the distant grinding of tiny … Read More

after Rodin   You never loved me. If it were really me whom   you adored, not just the sound of your own   voice, you should have been able to listen—   follow that one command not to look … Read More