jodiannstevenson

rebeccahardinthrift
  1. two hands resting on a table
  2. the dim light from my unromantic computer screen
  3. ice decaf
  4. why just women?
  5. why experimental?
  6. isn't everything an experiment?
  7. aren't we all women deep down?
  8. no time for telephone calls to people I love and should be talking to
  9. late nights while the baby sleeps
  10. a negative copy of a birth certificate
  11. a passport with someone else's name and my photograph
  12. the jesus lamp my grandmother doesn't know she gave me
  13. its pink and orange flowers
  14. its blue and pink petals
  15. its one remaining glass leaf
  16. the gold paint chipping off his chest
  17. painting over the torn wallpaper in my kitchen
  18. show us your boobs
  19. for that not so fresh feeling
  20. submit please for pete's sake just submit we beg you
  21. a photograph of someone else's grandmother's douche kit
  22. a photograph of the lake where I swam to the center
  23. I swam
  24. the Japanese beetles in my living room
  25. the way they bite
  26. lots of legal notepads – some small, others quite large
  27. competitive poetry is not poetry at all
1. some thing.
2. hot sun and cold dark water.
3. jodi’s bathtub baby and isn’t that something about women.
4. there are no trees in nevada.
5. not real ones, whose leaves turn over on each other in the breeze.
6. a long brush is the sound they make.
7. is brush an onomatopoeia?
8. puzzles.
9. plane rides.
10. space that looks like a construction site.
11. orange dirt piled up in big mounds.
12. turning thirty and aren’t we old and aren’t we still young.
13. a long walk in a park where prostitutes march in daylight and cars drive
slow and look.
14. when you teach, you are still on their calendar.
15. hating the back to school sales.
16. me. wanting everyone’s bits and pieces.
17. looking at others. not my own.
18. avoiding being alone.
19. the way writing forces.
20. the water. too cold to swim in.
21. to push body past the surface.
22. into the grainy blurry underneath.
23. the way it hurts your breasts.
24. wanting too badly to swim.
25. wanting too badly the shock and the floating.
26. i have dreams of flying the nights after a long swim.
27. my momma, who might look at this and call me and say, its beautiful,
baby, but what does it mean?