Jessie Janeshek
Jessie Janeshek's third full-length book of poems MADCAP is forthcoming from Stalking Horse Press in 2019. Her first two books are The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017) and Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). Her chapbooks include Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming). Read more at jessiejaneshek.net.
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Madcap/Pink Palace
I would rather bury you love to shut you up
I can’t help but blame you
lying, skipping scenes
seasick or pregnant champagne suds on split screen
the same naked footage burying me.
Each month dies alone and I don’t change my face
the carnival chit-chat the Dixie cup dog
the adrenaline alternate take.
Each month dies alone or I die in my pink car
the too-tight nude dress after meeting the queen
I forgive transport pattern recognition
the lie of rejection.
This is my early evening. Christ, I forgive everything
limestone, bad spirits coming in through the spine.
I sit on the phone I straddle the Predicta TV
or I sleep so much my life won’t matter
in the crooner’s old house I watch bad biopics
except for on Sunday.
Then I walk up this same hill
in pearls and hear the same song
and I miss my headspace
the red glow of the watertank
and what I want to do is stand in the empty
husks and rot time
or dance on the ice in a pasture
slip in the shape of a heart.
You think you’re the love of my life
or my lovelife
and sex appeal is milk
technicolor kitten lashes
and winning all the pageants
and/or shitting out my fudge mud
so I can win the pageants
and even the most vibrant past is governed
by your current limitations
and afterwards a nurse named Rosie
electrotakes your temperature
cracks your glitter just like that.
Madcap/Mary Jayne
Time me, purple hovel, turning brass under candles
then cancel out the noir dream of the railroad
and the dirty factory and the basketball court
where we turned around the noir dream where the man
kept stroking my thigh and I liked
the blacktop duress.
I can’t take your words red dots on my canopy
I want myself out of it can’t take your society
once similarity now smeary capsules
garish and clownlike now it will clear
no rain for nine days now I made the mistake
of starting the film with no Bette Davis.
Now I wear hearts on my shoes and eat pretzels
but I can’t not rush to the stoppage/bleed berries
I can’t reconcile cleanliness with the toy knife
stuck in the railroad tie.
               I stay in the light 35 times long
get sucked in the treehole
but they would not buy me a plastic snail
wherein to hide all my secrets (in the dream he liked me
more than his wife since I ate)
so I hid the pig in the drawer
and buried myself in his sleeping bag
my canopy bed was too fat and frilly.
Now nothing won’t get me in trouble.
I lay out the lace cards try to recite poetry.
They promised me an extension
a place to keep all of this
besides my legs
I had to pretend my cheap doll was another doll
but it wasn’t too hard
with her taffeta hairbow
and our new town clock driven in
on the back of a semi
and only our bones to go on—
Madcap/Sympathetic
Chest pains deflecting your God complex
to feel kind of awful
upstairs it’s lonesome 10 degrees hotter I want to rot and not walk
or it’s my rank heresy my styrofoam deity
or my typewriter heredity or it’s your rotten
song of the south
or it’s me sticking
to the tan leather seats of the Dodge Eagle
autumnal and bronze-lipped next to the river
eating my creamstick in my suicide tartan.
I need to work above fragrance
pump swings or plastic swimming pool bracelets
your minutes expire I straddle exhaustion
I need to get gas but my chestpains start
I might die looking up from the mulch
under the sliding board under the spinner.
I am afraid of emotional investment
the night I fell off the pink banana seat bike
as those girls lost their heads it felt like I broke my chest
next to the baby pool. I am not heady
but I sit beside you on sparkly concrete
the water too cold to swim in
the ghost and you sashay
you essay your Tarot card lay
say you predict my poisonous blooms
my bleating blue dresses.
I lie and say I grew up in the basement
spinning the hammer in the play doctor kit
always nostalgic reflexive in summer
I lie and say our puppets will stay green forever
pickled in jars
after the stitches a butterfly bandage
on my leaking scar.
Madcap/Castleman
It was a question of me or a cargo of guns
and one of the rumrunners made a goat face
and I polished my shoes
like a pill’s coating no patience, no motivation
and sang a song in a pink hat wishing poison crossbone
a ghost hole for the garbage
and I touch up my roots for six weeks of winter
and I think my brain’s finite
10 men in suits pretending messiahs
and I make a mad face when one gives me a necklace
and this is the feminine side
and I guess I could climb a hill for a shaman
or for black fever and he’d ask what moon do you pray to
but who am I kidding?
I know my brain’s finite and it’s not too hard
to ingest or invigorate the soothe of hot water
and look there are doors on the rocks by the creek
and all through the dream
you kept saying what I make has no meaning
and plush days push longer so I do not eat
and I wear leopard shoes so it will stop raining
and I wear too-tight skirts and I drag my feet
and remember the cold spring he blew his head off
               the euphoria of the image of kidskin
a guitar built into the preacher’s fake leg
as the plastic wisemen
stared from the window in the church basement?
Jessie Janeshek's third full-length book of poems MADCAP is forthcoming from Stalking Horse Press in 2019. Her first two books are The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017) and Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). Her chapbooks include Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming). Read more at jessiejaneshek.net.