in Leatherpuss, Texas.
I drink the whiskey                  God recommended
            don’t swallow white pills.

 Did you ever see the lassie
                        tracing her bribe down the front of our the jack-in-the-box?           

Our father dresses        her in a clownsuit
                          so we see our excess
our pigpen                   our playpen                  our hairy premise                        

our dark green love      on rocks reflected        our leech rivulet. 

                           I’ve made this wet mess
when all I wanted                                was peace Pentecostal
                        the neuropsychotic                              softness in us. 

Now, your orange-sequined shirt
                                                            reaches my knees.
                        You tie the pink scarf                          under my chin
like I have a toothache                                               

turn me to the life-sized

automaton and                        his soldier-pink cock.

I walk toward him thinking how you get the privilege                        since you almost died
                                and I’m the anarchic presence                        usually hunkering under the sunporch.           

and summer’s the end     cry the clown girl’s dark glasses 

and how then you’ll hunt me for my fur.

     

Jessie Janeshek

Jessie Janeshek's second full-length book of poems, The Shaky Phase, is forthcoming from Stalking Horse Press. Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia, (dancing girl press, 2016), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming, 2017). Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing 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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