Jess Jenkins
A Biography
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203 Brown Drive A metal coin in the grass houses pipes. I jump on it and the ring goes underground. I count to 8. One spring I was given a basket of ducklings. I can only speak to their softness. Cousins sit on the limestone outcrop. I pretend it is a bus, a blue whale. I am standing on the spiral stairs, waiting for traffic to clear. My legs are too short so I climb down sitting, quickly. |
HC 37 BOX 288A Gently running my finger along the lips of a fly trap. Closes slowly, interlocking teeth grin. I pour the water from pitcher plants. The kitchen floor fell through today, you must walk across this board to go to the bathroom. The sink goes nowhere. When I brush my teeth I run down the back patio steps and see my spit in the dead brown grass. |
127 Crane Ave. The kids on the avenue don’t live on the avenue. They live in fences on leashes, in trailers across the tracks in Ohio. A neighbor girl is two feet tall, she lives in a modified carnival fun-house. We play house. I’m mom. I make her eat onion grass from the cat bowl. There is a hole in the sidewalk. In green chalk below I wrote “put your money here.” |
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1212 Piney Glen Lane The cul-de-sac is a sack of spider eggs, her children multiply and leave on roller blades, thousands a day. This house is pre-fab, like Sears catalog homes after WWI. Hurricane Gordon dragged in garden lattice, lodged it in sand dunes. An ivy of tricycles and food paper grew. I met Tequila in my art class. I showed her how to tie shoes, how to draw a sitting rabbit. |
312 Echols Lane Her neighbor’s son works on a fishing boat in Alaska. She asks about him. He returns, fat bearded, jolly in his 30’s. The piano has been out of tune since my mother was 16, that’s 26 years. She shows me tin pictures of men I don’t know, of women who look like me, living in the bombe chest. In March, I find a blue plastic egg outside, from the Easter before, inside are 2 quarters. |
Extnd Stay Holiday Inn Hotel wall art can be a thing of beauty, what a nice gesture, the floral, the bible. We have wet pasta from styrofoam. I learn to like the peppers from pizza boxes. I leave notes for the Jamaican housekeeper, Zola. Zola is well. Zola is working to bring her son to Minneapolis. I write my name in pen on the wall behind the picture of the stream and the tree above the bed. |
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Aztec Pines Apartments The red squirrel society is currently closed to new members. Cashews are no use, I can’t touch them. The men that live here carry lofty electronics, drive company cars. The tumbleweeds are true-to-life, run like they are looking for Buffalo. I stand in pueblo places, in cliff dwellings in red rocks. My brother falls in a corner, needs stitches. We lost the deposit for the bloodstain. |
Foggy Bottom Farm The boots cost little more than 400 dollars. I approximate that I must shovel 2 tons of horse shit to make that. The minipony from the neighbor’s pasture brays at my bedroom window, wanting apples. The ex-wife burned the house to its stones, the antiques with it. Her sister- hood is horse wine, alimony, Italian-owned Laundromats |
5 Rooms in Lawyer Country His wife died in the dining room. The respirator left a sunspot in the corner, I cover it with a magazine rack. The bricks collect like pennies, the years stamped on them. The greenhouse – 12 sq. ft. of poison oak and garlic. I find his origami on the basement shelves, his pottery, two clay chess armies nestled in newspaper shreds in an old tangelo box. |
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Live in Boyfriend The heat gets to this house. It melts in the day. Once every 5 hours the train opens the doors, dislodges the plumbing. The tub is an open mouth with a bird’s feet. It swallows me whole, unless I stopper it. Raccoon junkie hoards the neighbors’ poppy varieties, he says. I find 17 California license plates below the sink, replace them with the Book of Mormon. |
Downtown It is the season of doing, of giving and going, of 23 stairs to one third rent along with the lights of the city, it’s screaming. Again, there is no floor, but a trampoline of fabric from which we mine small pieces of bronze, seven pronged copper stars, clear amethyst, clear, yellow gold, yellow lights and cabinet paper, small flowers. Once, I open the door to a roommate scraping liver pate onto Wonderbread. |
Jess Jenkins is 21. She is recently graduated from the University of Iowa and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at The University of Arizona. She’s lived in many different places but calls Southern West Virginia home. This is her first significant publication.
