Jessie Janeshek


Dream/Adoration     5^th Week


The cat’s done after heave
   and the village is jealous
Canadian jet stream
licking its edges

while Jezebel sits up
   silhouetting her wrist
where language pulls language
   past wax and risk

the ten days to shake up
   the six days to suffer
no baby powder
disinfecting this lake



What’s Ten Pounds? An Hour?


We had an agreement
the batgirl and I, two in the same.
Our narrative minds would not let you
shoot holes in the claude glass.

Diction erudite, I blurred the bait
said ambulance                hook and eye.

Hooded girls skated, triangular windows
pocketed switchblades, refusing you guilt
hung wreaths of tube roses over the keyhole.


The Lullabyed Rerhyme/Nullipara


Is it the constant
stop/start exhausting

a nursery-murdering
skinny-faced lion

Basil Rathbone stuffing
his beak with plague spices

or a tweed ulster
Old King Cole-lined?



                               12 blackbirds nod

                                             peaceful sky                three orange
                               terrible sky                               two

                                              your lawful-wed nightmare
                                              no way out                               through





                                              Then I fall up the wood steps
                                              in the tiny French theatre

                                              my ankle’s steel beam
                                              the blue light you read



Jessie Janeshek's first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English 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).
 
 
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