Category Archives: Jendi’s Poems

Recent Publications: Juked, Fulcrum and Others


A roundup of my recent publications news:

I just learned that I won an honorable mention in the 2007 Juked Fiction and Poetry Prize for my poems “Confession” and “The Opposite of Pittsburgh”. (Partial credit for the latter poem goes to “Ada Porter”, the character in my novel who actually wrote it. I just do whatever the voices in my head tell me.)

In other news, my poem “Zeal” was accepted for the 2008 issue of FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, an exciting journal edited by my old Harvard classmate Philip Nikolayev and his wife Katia Kapovich. (But as George W. Bush said when he went to Yale, I got in solely based on merit.) Philip’s latest book is Letters from Aldenderry.

Another poem, “Delivered”, will appear in the prose-poem issue of Poemeleon next month. I’ll link to it here when the issue comes out.

Finally, the University of Texas School of Law has made available online some poems I had published in the 2004 collection Off the Record: An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers, a special issue of the journal Legal Studies Forum. I also have a prose-poem, “Goodbye Capistrano”, forthcoming in their 2008 anthology.

Poem: “The Happiness Myth”


Do you bite the day or does the day bite you:
the sun like a gear wheel spinning with 
   hooked edges,
the sun a flaming pizza that greases your 
   mouth.
Tell me why you stopped drinking.
Are you in the oven or did you poke the witch
into the fire with her own iron-handled 
   paddle?
It’s not obvious that you should be sober.
Happiness spins like a drug lollipop,
vortex of primary paints where lick or 
   be licked
is only a simple choice for boys fighting.
The glass of euphoria fits in the palm of 
   your hand,
barely enough to drown your tongue-tip,
too much to empty.

                                 As for me,
I now wear my whalebone stays under 
   my ribs,
hoop skirts swishing in my womb like a 
   rustling hive.
Inside me is a thin person,
two policemen, a rhododendron, and a 
   sheepdog
trying to get out. Sometimes I’m opened,
wrong-sized, put away badly folded,
tumbled on a pile of my discount fellows. 
   Sometimes I open
the door like an airplane depressurized, 
   exploded,
plastic meals dancing in the blue contrail.


This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2007 Florence Poets Society contest and appears in their annual anthology, Silkworm. In writing it, I was inspired by poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong, an engaging history of cultural and philosophical prescriptions for a happy life, which have differed widely from one era to the next. Reading Hecht’s work always makes me happy.

Poem: “Gratitude”


In green dusk the rowboat, cradled
on lapping waves, floats unmanned
like the largest among fallen leaves.
The wind leans on the pier, wood answers
its old spouse, not needing half the words
to understand the familiar reply.
And still the scrub grass grips, leans into 
      each slap
of water and reclines gleaming.
Every leaf silver in the last light
waving, though there are no more 
      departures.
The trees are changing, cell by cell,
so slowly that they seem to be waiting
for something that is already present.
Flung by a scarf of breeze, a bird’s foghorn 
      hoot
spreads its echo over the lake, telling 
      of distance,
dares ropes to snap and oars to slice
into the eely dark.
But I, having learned of gratitude
so late, my best gift was turning
to leave the grass untrodden, the boat empty.


      published in the 2007 Voices Israel anthology

Poem: “Wishful Thinking”

   
To avoid you I go to the toilet,
push dust around the cellar, swipe the 
   slick decay
of leaves from the gutter. Nothing revolts you.
You’re so bored you’re falling out of the sky
but persistent as sleet,
not like myself whose Bible stops at January,
page-a-day saved by inertia from Easter.

Sometimes you ask me to lie down in the middle 
   of haste
like a madman’s blanket. Before how many 
   doorways
will I be thrown down?
Sometimes at dawn I climb the rope with 
   monkey hands
up past fear and gravity, beyond hoarding 
   myself.
An animal knows how much it can take.
I hoist the weights like a rower, one and 
   the other and one.
Don’t tell me yet what trial this is training for.

You’re the pillow under my head
and over it. You’re the hole in the road
that the gas truck hits, jacknifing into 
   gorgeous flame.
The woods above the highway are dark 
   with bears.
A lost child sees the glow, stumbles back to 
   her parents’ camper.

And what if there were no one pursuing? No storm
to blow my windows out? I could sleep 
   without whispers,
wake without guarding my eyes.
My friend the rational sunshine
says you’re wishful thinking, Santa-Claus daddy
come down through ashes just to indulge me.
Oh, but it’s cold on the roof of my life
under the flashbulb moon,
with no rumors of hooves sharpening above.
No one to know when I’ve been sleeping,
or with whom.

Now that you’ve gone, I won’t look at the shapes 
   of clouds,
dream-beasts that can’t resist your tearing apart.
No face remains; love’s rubbings even unpaint 
   the doll’s cheeks.
Spare me this corner, I said, and you left
the whole field bare
under an endless platter of good weather.
Wishful thinking: that moment darkened by the 
   brush of evening
when the child locked in the toystore wants 
   to be found.


   published in Literature & Belief, Vol. 26.1 (2007)

World’s Fattest Cat Wins Prize


Good news: My poem “World’s Fattest Cat Has World’s Fattest Kittens” has just won Second Prize, plus an award for Best Rhyming Poem, in the 2007 Utmost Christian Writers poetry contest.

This Canadian website, which aims at improving the literary quality of work produced by Christians, offers thousands of dollars in prizes (over US$4,100 this year). The deadline is usually February 28. First Prize this year went to Jan Wood for “just as you are in me and i am in you“. Read all the winners here.

World’s Fattest Cat Has World’s Fattest Kittens
–tabloid headline

A man walks into a bar and that’s
how I meet my father. Thirty years’ prelude
to a first date, in the amber mood
of brass and cognac, philosophic chat
spins the barstool back and I could be my mother
making us something intimate and undefined,
making someone you would leave behind.
My job-interview smile like butter
over the Riviera snaps of your daughters,
an alternate normalcy unreeled
by their tan arms, nothing concealed
behind your soft, proud chest but beach and blue waters.
But my awkward sister, dark-eyed – can’t you find
her moon-round face in yours, and yours in mine?

Tapas and wine, and God to take his turn
building the polite fortress of conversation;
two ex-Jews still wedded to disputation
and self-pity. The theatre crowd, as unconcerned
as you with tabloid reunions, disperses
into Manhattan’s blue lure. I say Jesus ended
life for our trespasses, but you’re offended
at this old, barbarous economy of verses.
You glow with gurus, out-of-body flight
and sinless man – convenient to believe
the soul can shed the seeds the body leaves.
And I, lacking the charity not to hate your
smooth life apart from us – who am I to spite
the last lawyer who has faith in human nature?

Dumb girl, ludicrous heredity
making me hang on your kisses like a teen,
then ask, like the boy-father to the child unseen,
who is this one, this virtual life, to me?
True father, tell me now, don’t we both nurse
our entitlements like a spitting-image son,
me judging life’s gift by how it was begun,
you grasping after apples with no curse?
Atonement’s just about dousing a blaze
someone else started. Till then, the wheel and snare
of karmic alleles conspires down the years
to put our eyes in an accusing face.
Tabloids and Genesis agree on that:
fat kittens must have come from fatter cats.

Poem: “A Myth”


Before the dam was built our people slept 
   under the water
and worshipped the dark bird-shadows of 
   boat hulls
which passed overhead, seen through 
   the ripples of distance.
Our crops were the weeds and growths that 
   trailed like tears
out of the sunken skulls of fish.
We scarcely noticed the water
weighing on our chests like a stone:
how do you notice a burden that has never 
   been lifted?
Speech went nowhere, a breath released into 
   the thick silence
that bathed us and sealed us in.
To communicate, we handed each other objects
dropped down from boats — a spoon for kindness,
a chronometer for death —
the phrases the gods had set for us.
After the dam was built we lay naked on 
   our dry beds.
It was so light we could not rest.
We had to believe that an element we 
   could not see
was now our own. The shadows we’d 
   learned to worship
streamed from every object. Some of us 
   bowed down
to birds whose shadows flickered across 
   the grass,
some to waving clotheslines’ shadowy flags,
and some to clouds that passed over the 
   whole scene,
dimming our other gods
to nothingness for a moment.
The weight of water being lifted from 
   our chests,
we learned the terror of aspiration, 
   as balloons
soaring, knowing they may burst.
And our words carried through the 
   new spaces
almost more than we could bear — released 
   like us
to travel, to die at unimagined distances.

         published in The Christian Century

Poem: “Poem for Simone Weil”


To think of faith as mine
is to bar the door.
My precious, my purity,
truth’s little coin I can bestow
or hoard, or nail up to gleam
like the prize on Ahab’s mast.
Is it humility that dumbs
men who should beg for this?
They affront me who have not seen death
shining in the plattered fish’s eye
and on the sleek braided bread,
death diving through the blue air
on the metal wings they trust.
A spoonful of ashes
where the tower stood.
Or still stands. Time collapses
in my eyes like God’s.

This thing I believe
happened once to a man
who possessed nothing but his death—
father-forsaken, letting the light
of the nations go out
like a match dropped from burnt fingers.
What obedience to refuse
to set an example
of faith’s triumph, which is but a subtler
triumph of the will.

I was on that hill, on the spit of land
where the walls fell into flame
and all around me wept, amazed and bloody
as babies after a hard birth
into all that cold space called the world,
their first permanence shaken.
Now you see what I see,
I thought
with relief, God help me.


      published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2003

Poem: “Melting”


Snow is melting on the breast of the hill
like milk, the comforting familiar sour smell
of the waking body rises from the earth

and I, who have gone through every day delirious
into featureless night, stunned by the drill 
      and whine
of the frantic machinery of my mind

never resting nor reflecting, conscious yet 
      unconscious
as a passenger all night waiting for flight
to a steel city whose name he can’t recall–

in waiting to see you I find my ease
and lightness, the way the wind suddenly lifts 
      a leaf
from the still hard ground, or the shining smear 
      of rain

streams down the sunlit glass, the drops of water
such fertile transient sparks. It’s a gift
I don’t know how to hold.

Like honey it’s too rich for reality,
too protean to grasp, too sticky to get free 
      altogether:
it changes things, stains them with sweetness.

All I know is I can’t sit with my back to the sunset
in this high sterile chamber, the entire mortal show
of vanishing light only seen on my walls in 
      reflection.

So let a warmer wind play on the harp of the 
      bare trees
and the branches fill up with leaves like notes:
I, too, will sing.

Not smooth and not solid is the crust of the earth
when thawing water cracks and wrinkles 
      the ground.
Our feet quickly grow muddy, heavier to lift.

But above us the frosted trees drop their 
      common diamonds
of melting ice: not imperishable, but in lovely 
      abundance.
And so it goes on, moment by moment.


         from A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003)


Poem: “At Breakfast”

In the curve of the apple the child saw a 
      presentiment
of her life with them– a smooth cheek, 
      reflecting nothing
in its dull shine, the juice’s sour bite only within.
Words flew around her head each morning 
      like black birds
flapping from one carrion to the other.
The child couldn’t leave the dishes to soak.
She washed them as they grew soiled, 
      so no scrap
would lie neglected for long. Living with them
was like standing still
while two dressmakers picked over 
      every stitch
of what she wore, with bleeding fingers,
till the last scrap fell away into threads.
Should she move? Should she tear
the draperies away, or pick up a needle
and stab along with them, crying, “This is how
I want it mended, over here!”?
Meanwhile spoons scraped the bottoms 
      of bowls
and the water in the cups went down.
There wasn’t much time
before they all had to leave.


published in A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), and in Hanging Loose

Poem: “favors for undesirable men”

The two quarreling:

pliable affair acquiescent? frequent, discreet, enthusiastic?
      –bellicose forsaken Horton, bartender;

            insolent lick! approve brainy celibacy
               –flip schoolgirlish Hollywood Helena Lee

An agitated lady
in scarlet headbands, chiton velvety

   Horton: lounge bartend asexual chronic
   admire the creamcolored beautiful secretary
   lettuce masturbate
   one sexy cylinder—visible, lengthy!

         Helena: seeing someone come?
         confusion expel itself nasty.
         lesbian estop nuzzle

Tapping the glass
official functionary aunt postal domestic

         Hey you have a card waiting from “Antimony
P. Bantamweights”

The telegram contained:

      Hi it’s been too long since I saw you

      married screwworm despotic
      shrill absolute delilah
      cyanic wedlock
      DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL

      desirous chance herein
      Sunday
      fiery bondage ejaculate
      your secret drosophila, is my secret


Something rustled under
bedroom divan
amiss worrisome degeneracy, brassiere

injudicious doll

      Horton: hellish hypocrisy! devil knows what’s–

And followed after
buff Diego, grievous sense impelling

Irrepressible fear came

      at the big windows
      the downpour burst

a dusty cloud
emblem battlefield hot

final lusty fisticuff — riven proud innards
blood ran down
drenched fragment of mirror

         Helena: Diego, did you shoot—
         staggering and looking

Horton
dying, fancied the lights
aqua flashback, halogen dream


Author’s Note: This poem, including the title, was entirely composed of phrases found in spam emails.