Author Archives: Jenny

  Let the wind whip a canvas with coffee grounds and leaves, the easel upright on a porch with boards missing like molars. Give the wind time and pigment: the reedmace-colored whisky my grandfather hid in his overcoat, the pistol-black … Read More

  this one     and this one on a ferry a toddler in my lap whose? someone headless holding a live lobster aloft when? my daughter laughing at Pea Soup Anderson’s on the way to— ah! San Francisco? Vancouver? and … Read More

  If my nerves were sturdier, If I could let your apocalypse talk roll off my back, if my favorite nightcap were plunging over a cliff and being pulled back, if I didn’t like to kick off my boots and … Read More

  I cringe to recall the blue morpho’s pop Zen garden where mistakenly I stomped a butterfly golden koi kept vigil with the speckled flames of their bodies every summer night squandered not one bottle of wine shared with the … Read More

  In this city of crows and rose-ringed parakeets, elephants and camels labor down the beach, marionettes tell stories in knotted banyan trees. Old monkeys with young men, men-monkeys in old stories more pure than whatever we believe. For a … Read More

  I am musing for amusements, looking for something good. Ancestral spirits back me up. I am searching, and they are heaven-sent. What is beautiful? It lasts an instant. I hand out lists of lovers and reflections. Someone writes me … Read More

  I drive by first, observing the posted speeds as though I’m looking to live at the end of the street or, season and time of day permitting, I’m hunting an ostentation of Christmas lights. Sometimes, I am simply lost. … Read More

  Looped on the branch, ominous is the goose’s long neck aglow in morning sunlight, black feathers glossy and sleeked down, beak tapered into the air: a jetty. I do not know this goose’s story, the sum of miles in … Read More

  Do you still look and see that it is good? You spoke, then saw what you’d wrought. We are the monster in the mirror, God, your world made of words. Let there be untied sky from earth and sea, … Read More

  In your dream of what never happened a boy turns away from your grief, and each month’s empty womb tolls a compline to spring. Once you knew time as a starving, sumptuous waste that felt better than pomegranates ever … Read More

  A faint glint reflected off the steel beneath the paint, then, like connected stars, like a graved fate, a pattern of scratched lines, scored letters, scarred words— I hate my life punctured through the pigment.

  If the gullet of a brown man is pink, he must be born of salt. Before hanging, his back must be strict as leather pleated by a cherry knife—blue light must swallow his angels to their bones. 911 give … Read More