Issue 3:1 | Poetry | Edison Jennings

5 Poems

by Edison Jennings

Thermodynamics

Dusky summer witchery–we’re spellbound

watching sparks rise partway to Paradise

before they’re snuffed.

Lucky beasts, fire flies,

with loins that burn for love. Take one in hand–

there is no heat, only a glow you may

recall, like honey the body melts to

after fucking–then release or crush it

as you will; there’s plenty more.

See them rise

from new-mown grass time and time again.

---

Et Tu

When the valve was closed, cutting off the air,

you flailed and thrust your hand, long fingers flexed

to choke the mother fucker choking you.

But he watched beyond your reach.

Afterward

the Chaplain said, “death comes in many forms.”

Oh, it comes, alright. It came as a son.

And did you reach for me in airless dark

to pull you from the grip around your throat?

---

Revision

Forgotten in an open room, the poems

became unlettered, baptized to a blur

by rain while I slammed doors, pulled windows shut,

except for where the arid manuscript,

lay on a sill and caught the random drops

that grew to floods of tributary lines,

mirages of thought, opaque oases,

puddles of syntax, semantics of grace.

Spherical Trepidation

Nothing’s far beyond our ken.

Heather McHugh, “Far Niente”

So there’s the North Star, not too bright

among the more illustrious,

but glinting like a battered nail

from which the weight of heaven swings,

and nothing holds the nail in place

except the void it’s stuck in.

For heaven’s sake, old nail, hold tight.

---

Two and Winter Landscape

for Andrea Jennings

Ice-falls clung to limestone cliffs, the sheer rush

draped with watered silk.

She placed a finger

to his lips, and in that coma nothing moved

except snow-baffled streams, the random snap

of shivered limbs,

their breaths like souls released,

no sooner free than lost in all that white.