Jessie Janeshek

Chapped Draft/Handbasket

Angry at lattices, brass toenails, futility

I pray for black-knotted solemnity.

It’s all so inevitable.

He forces me down, claws in my back

aluminum bones and a dusty snake carcass.

O Holy Incommunicado

I wrap your knick-knacks in pink

drape the grass rabbit

in incongruous jewelry.

May your old night a luminous bomb

be more kind.

---

This Starts with Girls Fighting Birds in the Foyer

I guess it’s my strange way

to let go the gristle

bloat-smashed rubber roadkill

watch the dead opera blunt love on the cusp

through a bay window

where fucking means nothing but time.

I guess there’ll be glass

once rain washes horseshit

and tusked pigs throw up on the pickups.

Day three, where are we? Hooves and black pudding

drape the small body

I try to taint.

This log house’s lawn

has its own genre.

Our trauma stretches

across every ghost.