JENAI MARLEY RHODES LONGSTAFF
POETRY
BASIS LITERARY MAGAZINE,
Show Teeth, Grin and Bear It
2011
Rose patterned
(afternoon to morning)
In the soggy afternoon, our unruly wings struggle from their thread bindings.
We are swollen ribs blossoming into sprout-eating performance artists,
shooed from the south of France. We are
the throbbing bodies of sparrows.
We smash against the window above the kitchen sink,
quite unnoticed,
avoiding the last smear of sky.
We began alone in a vast desert, born from the force of an inward heat.
But now we are naked
and aware
and caught in the rain,
breathing in caked moonlight,
shaking.
You say we should be weeping, but we aren’t.
You say we should probably start the ritual now, but we don’t.
We don’t have to rip out our hearts
and place them on the frozen grass
just yet.
We have the night and we have the mud.
The thick cracks in our birth-desert are healed by soundless rain,
by the firm pressing of our hips and
you assume
you assume now that my dark-brown eyes
are sobbing for the fall from grace
but they’re not.
I have to remind you that we aren’t real,
our arms are sliced oranges
on exquisite polish pottery.
Our minds are wailing birds
obsessed with the golden insides of their eggs.
This morning your grandmother
told me that she is sitting on the rose-patterns
of the couch,
just
waiting to die.
It made me cry, like you said we should. I howled
with the wolves
harmonizing with the growing consciousness that we all have a
flower-print grandmother in us,
a part willing to say the words that we all taste.
Silt ritual In Surreal Cranberry Sauce
Everything melts down to the gestures made by the rabid heart,
a mixed metaphor for the brain,
mocking the rocking-horse
straddling your
grotesque intentions.
You intend to mock
the grand halls of the desperate opera house,
so you hold the hand of the
girl in organic galoshes, who
shouts in her sleep,
repeating lines of systematic repercussions.
You escape,
find gasping
opera singers
wrenching the strings of the blind church organist.
As you blush, you find yourself, on the stage,
ripped,
abandoned,
tired of the sky
tired of exploiting the musical properties
of your strange body.
You watch from above as it partakes in the orgy
on the University mall.
.
All around you,
the words that happened in free wings of violent fear
echo in unison with
rainbow approximations of the soul, returning,
slowly,
meekly,
wearing knitted sweaters
minds unmade;
pure
with shapely lips,
writhing,
and stretching their skin towards the ultimate.
BASIS LITERARY MAGAZINE,
Focus Thine Anarchy
2012
The Grass Is Greener at the Foot of Mercy
1. We take in
the rose milk tea,
the squid,
the falafel from the little stand of Israelis on the corner of the street.
we breathe out
a sigh laced with a Chinese boy blushing against the American man in the
tie-dye suit.
He holds the raquette and belts out a lady gaga song on the public bus,
as synchronized swimmers twist their legs and a woman crouches,
slicing ginger in the doorway.
We inhale the drying laundry hanging out the window,
which stares openly at the leaking sky,
ignoring the silent whistles and legless men pressing against the lacy underwear
and mismatched socks.
We stretch out
our hips, bamboo-bruised,
tied up with time,
yearning to see past the clouds.
We feel
the moment the sun becomes the moon;
it peels itself from the sky,
dropping into our sweet-peach sundae,
running down our legs like the nude rainstorm
or the girl in the pigtails hemmed in on a scooter
dripping a pink popsicle on her mother’s thigh.
We melt into
this toast and jam,
forgetting how to use our forks.
2. Catching cold, we squint at the place we know the hunger must be.
Tilting our heads at the capital letters strewn across the floor
and the dead goldfish, mimicking a mango peel,
crying out for attention in a language he doesn’t understand,
melting its hands together.
3. I don’t need to graze my body with your praying hands;
let’s eat in tonight and I can wash your clothes
and turn you inside out
because these don’t connect to midnight wizards or boating trips.
Smearing a red-bean popsicle on the stinging places,
I tear your eyes away from the cheap fruit piled on the train cart,
handing you a banana from my back pocket:
the people you expect to surprise you,
suction cup your spine twenty-two times with one blind eye.
They make room for those who don’t exist,
justifying the exchange of blood.
4. We hop nervously from one foot to the other,
trying to match our shadows up with
our stolen lunch money
we back into the elevator,
press all the buttons so we don’t have to land.
5. The empty fish bowl still sits there, unliving in the living room.
6. And our days overlap at the edges.
7. So you pull me into the tomato plants,
out of the bread shops where I keep asking what’s inside:
do you have a soul made of whipped crème and red-bean paste organs?
hearts and ribs cut from a sweet melted banana,
hoping with all your might that the fish with the sticks coming out of their mouths are not alive, lying against the flames, licking the fallen lotus root and red graffiti—
lips burning from the secret recipes,
you trip into the street,
ankles swelling into ripe fruit.
8. The policemen,
flirting with you in another language from across the room.
9. We narrowly avoid the singing man with the one hand,
leaving the “-ings” on the side of the street
for the women in orange, who bend like ancient trees, to sweep away with branches.
The blush of melted flowers beneath you as you stand silently, entertained by the rubber band woven around your hand.
10. You say eggplant to fake a smile,
with a misplaced tooth and sunflower feet.
and the bruises from yesterday’s
sun: a japanese flag hanging itself against the back of the afternoon.
11. and we were left to turn into dragons and cranes on the stage,
spending the nights on a woman’s 18th century rug collection,
taking the weekends to recover.
12. on the bus (300) anorexic cousins and Irish prisons.
The hypocritical protection of life,
leaving a mark against your translucent legs. Your impression of my sweetness, papaya and corn soup, is off
but I’ll gossip with you if you don’t turn the page.
13. With a fourth toe longer than the rest and
sandal tan lines—
she can tell by the painful places
my sleep schedule and the state of my kidney and cerebellum
to stay off cold foods.
14. Can you tell if someone is breathing from the fourth floor window? or the fact of matching strawberry fingers
15. eating stingray in a room made of windows, the shy girl with the braces passes you a note over the lazy-susan,
and a woman asks you if your eyelashes are real
(they are)
16. skin in a karaoke room: you tell me with your hands and lips and pale blue eyes that the insect is trapped between the panes of the aeroplane window.
I tell you it’s dead and I won’t ever be able to believe you when you tell me I am beautiful—my knees are in a puddle of someone’s insides
and my neck, with bruises kissing its surface.
We are all finding ourselves in each other’s flesh.
I brush the hair out of her face, letting the world breathe—
it’s standing with its head back and mouth open,
not ready to go back,
choking on the pouring rain.
Teaspoon
Thick breath hangs over the bed,
I stand at the back of the room
pressing my back against your eyes.
We’ll go to the dance,
naked bodies dipped in glitter, resist the
primal urge to take our hearts out and let them run around on the playground.
After the slides and swings, I stand at the kitchen sink, white as bone, pouring
the (always) cherry cough syrup down the drain.
Your eyes are pressing back against my head. You take the over ripe
fruit from the bowl in the center of the table, bruising my hips with your eyelashes.
They told me when I was seven
how the moon vomits up a teaspoon of blood and marine life each month.
I keep It in a jar on a shelf next to my other collections.
They told me when I was nine
how our days cover themselves in embarrassment.
I tell you
and you sit up,
reminding
me to feed the cat before I leave.
My hands smell like meat
as you get up and go through the large red door.
BASIS LITERARY MAGAZINE,
This Side Up: A Collection of Little Monsters in the Dark
2010
Chopsticks
there is nothing left of the
body except for the nose
the nose is the body now; through the gimmick is still
present with modification.
murderers could be drinking tea and eating
delicate
tea cakes on the other side of the Hudson river.
please pass the sugar cubes.
while the heroes may be bludgeoning a fairy princess.
please pass the cudgel.
a family stood together on a silent street
with their expressionless expressions
like candle wax or peach skin
the artistic mind of the girl with the green jacket and the
black galoshes
shown through her dark eyes, setting her apart from the sky.
the coloured pencils and the red chopsticks in her hands
glitter with tears
(catching the light)
and the stairway behind the clustered group is red and
crumbling
it leads to a yellow door
which opens to a long hallway
with a green elevator at the end
which sometimes smells like guava-mango
but sometimes like coffee
and sometimes like sweat.
guava mango ears
is the will but
exemplified by the
wiggle of the smallest finger?
or is it more
a reason, opinion, feeling
eaten at the country fair
along with rainbow popsicles and watermelon?
her vermilion nails and guava mango ears
pressed against the back of the world,
while the placid blue sky piled against me in the train.