Track our helpless gel manicures
our antler headlamps.
We’re hoodlums, log-cabined, obsessed with our cysts.
We dream in sands and clowns
won’t conform to your cycle.
Track suicide seek our carp eggs
fat thighs and cellulite beads.
We’re still early, unfollowed. We won’t attend mass
keep stepping on hot plugs cannot stand the gaffe of being loved.
Your midwife pierced us at our brim like gypsies
the clouds of the father/our mom couldn’t watch.
We hate how you waste
our days on the rusty net
obvious fire escape. You’re disaster en masse.
what we can’t have on the red cherry bumpers.
You’re the gold butter ring in our soup
when we sleep too long curved fat and useless
when we get too greedy want to shape
blue + brown toothpick tents
for our Girl Scouts. Delicious.
Our French nails are shaky
our faces too big.
The June moon is brass.
Our snatches nip.
GEL ENVY
You’d think it was playtime
the way we went wrong
but it’s one of those wolf and
dog days, freestyle.
We railroad
the playground. We dance
in capes how’s that for appetite?
boys sucking our thongs.
God wears a poodle skirt w/bullet sequins
the owl’s in the closet
a hole in the cloud’s parataxis, sour underboob fat.
They say we have talent so what?
the poem turns
we climb out of the batting cage
into the church
rabid, we foam
over the yellow Jeep tracker
how we’d hold back traffic
outside the middle school blacklight dance
how we’d rinse our feet
in the bath unpoetic
our homes built of stones
from the burnt-down orphanage.
We’d house happy ghosts
who’d sign our white t-shirts
who’d say our cravings
pass in 10 minutes
but we want to prick that newscaster, Violet
ex-Bluebird Scout
right in her multiplex head.
RAH-RAH NOSTALGIA
We want to succeed in our cheerleader’s bedroom
with peaches and perverts and pennants.
We want to move between teenage wastelands
learn how to fuck in this epidemic.
Can you see how we bleed
all over the Sweet Secret Jewelry Box House
all over the wedding-cake-shaped generator?
We’ve had our fever: the dark haunted maze
in our old swollen high school.
We’ve ambled. We’ve lumbered.
We are royal babies. Our forecast is poor.
We wear green mascara where grey graves
are one-size-fits-all.
We agree to this fiction to live high emotion
but we’re lost and sore. It’s a problem of logic
inside the old drama. The big crystal cross
wears a blue tutu. We’re fueless, don’t feel
like going for a jog.
Did you see us lurking
in the church doorway
in our velvet skirts?
We speak poorly of you, boning like dogs
know all could hold true in your similar universe
if we’d break the walls.
Jessie Janeshek's chapbooks Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish and Rah-Rah Nostalgia are forthcoming from Grey Book Press and dancing girl press respectively. Her full-length collection of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008). You can read more of her poetry at jessiejaneshek.net.