Issue 3:2 | Poetry | Rachel Jennings
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Three Poems by Rachel Jennings
Chicano Studies
Muy estimado
Don Profe Chicano,
I mean no disrespect,
but a kindly compañera
once confided that she
overheard some jokes,
your door cracked open
but she not seen outside.
Some silly banter about
Kentucky trash, inbred
fools, possum folkways.
My whole past, that is.
So, in short, I never enrolled
in your classes, but
I have wondered always
whether to sit at that table
might have felt like family.
No, for us, a dialectic:
an unlikely pair, intense,
heard in half-historic hallways
in fully formal argument
that might approach affection.
The movie would go another way,
of course, if directed by
Hector Galan or Luis Valdez,
and yet another way if cut by
coalmining Kentucky cowboys
who’ve never seen a sunset
(and won’t) but love a hick flick,
a whiskey-drenched Western.
Still, I reckon, in our storyline,
our names would be
linked forever, duly recorded
in an index or the endnotes.
Let’s imagine it.
Corpus
Christi
Getting off
the bus,
bone-tired,
in Corpus
Christi
on the Gulf
Coast,
I seemed
a beaten
soldier
come home
or a scared
wife
on the lam
as I
strained
in a body
that could
not
forget
Knoxville
or how to
work a job
or crave a
bed
or want a
meal.
At that
moment
the
sky-tossed voices
of past
lives sang anew,
rose
high-sounding like
something
lonesome not cruel
indeed
close enough
to embrace
in both arms
as if I had
listened
for the
first time
to
sole-trodden earth
or saw
suddenly
that the
lights flickering
on the
time-crowded highway
were a
sacred dance music
whose
insistent rhythms
threaded
the broken night
like the
tortured branches
of a
patriarchal tree
or the
veined cracks
in a
baroque mirror
brought
home
to a wife
from a war
gone by.
Dancing off
the pavement,
each
rhythmic note sang another.
Crashing
the Gates
It’s some
off-the-streets,
clean-air-for-slum-kids
charity
scam
deep in the
postmodern
wilderness.
A small-town
spin mill
produces the news
that half-craighed
Irish teens
from Derry
and Belfast
have landed
safely
and
picture-perfect
in the
Atomic City,
the City of
Tomorrow,
the City
Behind
a
Picket Fence,
the Gated
Community
for
Peaceful Living
incorporated
as Oak
Ridge, Tennessee—
to us,
ridges and valleys
lost on a
dime spin
and
jokingly named
the
Manhattan Housing Project.
It’s time
to land the plane.
It’s time
to crash the gates.
The
Transatlantic kids are vessels
in
Tennessee
of learning
and remembering.
They will
not surrender.
They are
unsinkable iconoclasts, and
it’s time
to rock the boat.
‘R-U Ready
for the Coming?’
asks the
sign
hand-stencilled
and nailed
to a tree
by the side
of the road
in rural
Anderson County.
