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Four Poems
by Jennifer L. Knox



The Fattest Woman I Ever Loved

was a contralto who drove birds to suicide. Frantic to plunge themselves down the source of her sound, they’d hurl themselves from the sky at her chewing mouth. Her lips were pitted with scars, and her spherical shadow was often peppered with bits of broken beak. I wanted to see Voice, but I only saw Fat. She'd wear a black tent with a neck hole cut in it and stand far behind other people in photographs which made her look like a ventriloquist dummy. She spent the night once—her footsteps on the stairs made the whole house wheeze like a Borscht Belt clown's accordion. From her nest of blankets on the sagging couch she kept waking me up to do impressions of the animals where she came from (Sandusky—did I mention that?). Her donkey made me laugh 'til tears poured down my furry face. I haven’t laughed like that sober in a dog’s age. She would’ve reminded me of my mother, if I would’ve let her.

Seabirds

Sundown: I was pantsless, stranded with gimpy Ma and gaunt Granny in a bombed-out station, waiting on a train that wasn’t ever coming. But I knew needed to protect them from that bare, hissing wire of information. Sure, we were going to die, but would we lap at the blood pumping from the throat of our own like hogs? Bikers with tattoos hidden between their fingers grabbed their nuts and barked. Faded little families huddled around trashcan fires. Then I was topless, clutching closed an unraveling towel. A biker whoop! went up. What lovely seabirds! Mother said of the sick things suddenly in the air all around us—eelesque, hissing through teensy fangs, wingy fins rolling like the hem of a flamenco skirt, skirting too close, sizing us up. Don't touch those!—I yelled to the old women—They aren't seabirds! One brushed my arm, but I dared not flinch. Instead I chanted I hate seabirds in my head and held my breath, which I was so good at, my held breath held together the cracked concrete all the way down the empty platform, ‘round the bend, down the dead line far as I could see, 'til I could see no more but seabirds.

Beverly Hills Cop III

This again, but way lamer. We started out
outlaws, now we’re law (in shi-shi suits, yet).
Why does every bright, rare thing we are boil
out like wine’s kick from a simmered port glaze,
leaving only virgin vapors, the Ghost of Badass?
Like this: the synthesizer—formerly a wink, sweet
mystique—thunders now—boops and stomps around
hammy as a Scottish soccer anthem. The walk-on
waiter and his foppish lisp have sailed from sidelines
to sidekick—shares every scene, gets his own
badge, his own girl, his own fight and fall.

Otters are the Parrots of the Sea

It’s simply a magical fact—a equation manifest
in the blooming peach tips of our alveoli, each tip
ringed with dewdrops, each dewdrop crooning under
a microscope in steady four-four time. They sing,
“You cannot separate the magic from fact, fact
from the magic, wing from wind, gravelly pill
from the smooth peanut butter, death from the body’s
hull that doesn't cave or pop after, just still is sans
21 grams. Like the bluish hues on feather and fur,
both are true of both: they travel in packs/
their noises drive skulkfish and vultures away.”