Jessie Janeshek

Fragile Jezebel / Birthday Advent


Hair bunned like a schoolmarm
     wickered, hush monied
this legless woman
​
     floats out to see
her gold vinyl mattress
     piss-scented. Run

by a joystick. Shift to the T.
     Hoop-skirted, terminal
hanging crepe

from her lashstubs.
     All two eggs in her basket
refuse to sing orange.

(A Pageant Poem) Pouring Green Acid

                                          
on three Queen Bee noses                    poor little lowlight
     intuiting swimsuits                               red open-toe shoes
          come with me heelprints                    it’s talent, her flossing
callipygian fiddles                    but poor little nomad’s
     too sick to take off                              or even ask how
she let that priest                    rip off her autumn
                    he runs like a girl          leaves yellow ashes
beech cats                    typing nonce poems
all over the orangeskin                    of each calico whore
                    poor little smokethroat                    needing to swallow
this bone called sadness                    or land hard and crack it

Full-House Chronophobia / Hide-Out Room


You climb exhausted
     sepia knifehand
bile-gleaming the banister
     Marc Antony gasping

we’ll try all the remedies
     mascara     elixir
weaving the backstairs
     noir web they’ll believe

post-cabaret heel-glue
     a Chinese air gun
Marc Antony gaping.
     Cops cast their dragnets

bear-trapping Ziegfeld girls
     costumed as moths.
Put on this dovecoat
do not interrupt me

     recoulementing
our alibi lullaby
Marc Antony bobbing
     your blueblack hair dawn.
 



--
Jessie Janeshek’s first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). The 2011-2012 Renner Visiting Scholar/Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College in Bethany, WV, she teaches writing and American literature. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. In 2008, she co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press).