Jessica’s Poetry Books
My fourth trade collection of poems for adults is finished and looking for a home right now! I love making drawings in response to poems - and have done this for other poets, and also for my own poetry books. I like to work with pencil and ink on vellum, especially.
It’s not so hard to believe that solitude is the catalyst for life.
The starting point of any description of human anatomy is the standing posture. The first stroke determines the entire composition. This is why an empty canvas, the future, is dangerous. What is determined at conception, in that moment when my father faced the wall, my mother stood up to straighten the sheets.
Geese assemble, making a racket. They sleep at the bend where the river swells. It’s a comfort I don’t matter to them. All they do is fly back and forth. They know what they do.
I mistook bottle-caps for love, I know.
The albatross is mistaken when she fishes plastic from waves but that doesn’t mean we aren’t culpable.
Eating quince with musicians. The cellist finds us in the low notes, the violin lifts an auditorium with one string.
Long slow abdomens surface in the night.
Our blind draft horse Ted used to follow me around the paddock, his head on my shoulder. I’d see me in his watery blue eye, upside down.
My nephew tells me he’s stopped playing at recess because he’s reading about dragons. I think about artichokes because i have no one to love with my body.
Bad things erased by oranges. Everything is hungry, even me eating an orange while dogs rummage through peels and chicken bones.
Yes, love. When you’re asleep, I dream a diagram, a and b and c. a - one hair that’s too long, a stray, an eyelash on a white page, a curved note saying something about you can always be lost.
Again we find each other in dark. We can make new people. Don’t explain the necessity of war to me. Explain love.