Author Archives: Jenny

  A cowboy spits dip into used bottles, the hounds unfed for days, dishes yawning, uranium seeping, and you name buzzards, read the backs of soup cans, T.V. guides,– it’s how you forget the old life. You merge into pits, … Read More

  He remembers waking in the grey silence, stepping into patched trousers and cracked leather boots. The stables of memory still smell of sawdust and damp earth. The milk cows low hopefully. He is nineteen again. He pours the feed, … Read More

  We believe we can extend a hand to those who suffer. The air is suffused with heavy rain. Taking in the afternoon, shifting gears. We try to grasp what has befallen those whose loved ones fell. We read late … Read More

  See the ink below your knee. There your veins were mapped and quarried. The line your groin defines remains intact, smooth like timber, the timber of a ship, a Viking ship, long preserved before its harvesting. Notice now your … Read More

  ate the still-beating heart, folded when the gods came calling. son of a sewn thigh, son of a mortal. she bathed in the river, lost to lightning. lover crashed into her, gave her the seed of the world. Semele, … Read More

  You tell me this: the inlet was not carved from this spit of land by glaciations, frozen inching of big water. Not the insistences, waves, the riving wind-limned eye of a storm. But rather, the steady press of man, … Read More

  And then an old man and I looked through the scrap pile in the back, sifting through lonesome reams of brake pads and spools of cable housing, orphan top tubes, wheels,tires deflated and folded over themselves like cordgrass bent … Read More

  There: at mile twelve we stopped at the chattering of some small trees, distant against the low sky doubling itself across the shallow waters of the swamp. What kind are they? I asked. Ibis? Egret? Heavy in the brush, … Read More

  It’s the boat I choose for transport into the new year I lie down in its hammered gold, my right shoulder against its curve From this posture, I will study stars, meteors, Milky Way and any way I trust … Read More

  I’m the object I am and at times I’m another and am far sitting in water and sand in an echo of burning tongues And dream, yes, I dream the colossal adventure of the human word stabbed and drunk bleeding in memory of the dead who seem … Read More

  Some regrets take the air, almost visibly, bright against the mind’s wide sky. The child you never had, for some reason red-haired. The way you said goodbye to your first real girlfriend. The boy, the bicycle, the stop sign … Read More

  Dec. 18, 2013, Akure. At night, inside the reflection of a halogen lamp, I told my younger siblings A story about our dead mother. I told the story, my siblings swayed on a swing; forward and backward. Backward: my … Read More