Soft Sides
I’ll kiss you up in the God light
soft-shell jokes pressed open sudden candor
hand squeezing space over heart gentle
collapse born fleshy with the soft sides out
sweet tendering saccharine animal
in the overflow body flume found
body nestled in basin
carbon sink in iris brine blue anemone
small bristle baleen tug
of tides cresting in our mouths descendants
of a squishy love people two
fish dancing in circles
keep praying for an opening
Faithwalking
Poem After “The Bridge” by C. Dale Young, Title After Ellie Rondon
She loves walking with headlights at her back,
crossing without looking. Her lips part like
open roadways, humming street lights on
parallel sides, white lines that tires drag black
marks through, waiting to be run over, again.
She’s gotten used to walking while swinging
a tenderizer, an extension of her arm, failing
to notice as it bruises sides of passersby. She
loves to stand too close to highway exits,
casting out her thumb to trucks with
a six-inch clearing distance.
She’s never trusted walking into open doorways,
arms that cling like cords of a suspension bridge,
hanging, steady, immovable from the weight of
cars passing overhead, never thought she
could find comfort in a body when
her own is a gravestone.
She walks up to the guardrails that form
his chest, lets herself descend there, head
on gravestone. Head on body. Head
clear for the first time since waking.
She’s spent her time gazing at the water below
the highway bridge, rising and growing darker.
She climbs over the guardrails
and throws herself to the surf.
Morning Glory Girl
After “Genus Narcissus” by Natasha Trethewey
I told myself I wouldn’t
die with you, that I wouldn’t die
with the taste of grief gummed
in my teeth, so dense that it tastes like a sickness.
I think I believed you were something
repairable, something I could love the hurt out of
until you, that morning glory girl,
would learn to see the purple there, too.
Maybe we were always
built to hold each other up like this,
but I’m not a picket fence you grow along,
and you can’t be leaning your whole life.
I chose to love you when
the stars in your eyes were burning,
and that was my mistake,
fueling a magic that felt like green
relief. I gave you these elixirs I made from
crushed up marrow. I guess I
thought my bones were
stronger than the twigs of my heart strings,
snapping, but never elastic, why
weren’t we elastic? I thought
I found you in a stone cave, but
this cage is glass and we’re
all shattering. I can’t remember
now if I made this heart from plastic
or if you shaped it in crayon wax like yours.
I only know what I wrote in ink on your skin,
what we promised when we couldn’t say goodbye at night.
You told me, I’m letting you go,
but what you really said was, Go on without me.
Jessica Bajorek is a poet from South Windsor, Connecticut. She is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University and the current co-editor in poetry for 45th Parallel. Her previous work has appeared in Font and Narrateur, Reflections on Caring. She has served as a judge for the Weaver Undergraduate Poetry Award and for Hofstra University’s Inaugural Poetry Contest for President Susan Poser. When she is not writing poems, you can find Jessica by the Willamette River reading horror novels and enjoying a good cup of coffee.
The Marbled Sigh 