ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
THREE POEMS
by Jennifer Chapis

Kitchen Floor

A diamondback rattlesnake torques my kitchen

corkscrew movement the floor its tiles individual

the snake strikes at every flipping

on of the light the ceiling so white it's blue

blue begging you to scale the wall anyway

any way you can through the raw space

poppies flower and won't stop

sizzle the floor

viscous garden climbing the walls

Speaking in Snakes

In my business, you want to be wrong, says the young neurologist-
medical-headed, his lingo like alphabet soup.
When I question the referral, tell him I'd rather find a chiropractor or change my diet, how about exercise?,
he asks, What do you do, anyway? And when I answer, Poetry,
he laughs a whole hearty bowlful and orders the MRI, his fingers at home in my chart.
I tell him, I once saw madness in a glass eye.
Excuse me, he smirks.
Apples bake brightly in an heirloom pan.
What?
And as I continue (evacuating evangelists, platypus on a platter),
his thumbnail blossoms pink from gripping and sweating my now-bent chart.
His other hand scratches the inside of his ear
with the ink-end of a monogrammed ball-point pen.

At Belmont and Sheffield

The only open space in the inner city,
Club Medusa's icy parking lot like a glazed cake top.

Pink hair, black trench coats,
guys and girls grouped and scattered--alert as crows.

Jeannette has stars on the inside,
smooth brown leather on the outside,

her eyes (two green cars speeding around the lot)
lead to moments like loose threads,

to episodes too infinite for the tinted windows of a Chevy,
the Valentine's-Day-window of a video store.

Their Chevy Caprice glides by us like lightlessness:
doors and hood, space between roof and

windows--cracked just enough
to make us think.

This is when Jeannette sinks her nails into my shoulders,
pulls me down to the gravel, to the ripping

of our striped stockings, skin torn in a star from her knee.
And everyone who was anyone hears

the most perfect popping,
a succession like silence.

On the same ground, ten feet from me,
a boy in a white shirt grows red,

the spot expanding out from itself
like breath in the cold.

"Someone call an ambulance!" Jeannette screams,
her nipples stiff enough to cut,

her jacket wrapping a house
around the boy disappearing

like the everyones to the other side of the chain-link fence,
to the spaces between wires.

"What's his name?" The police officers demand,
"Who knows his name?!"

Jeannette whispers
in the boy's ear, her lips

so near to the stranger bleeding in her coat,
so close to his voice, his name.

I never do see his face
gone in an ambulance down a reticent street in Chicago.

Voice into the spaces that move faster than we can,
that echo like sirens above club music,

"Call an ambulance! Someone
call a fucking ambulance,"

this pleading,
this ruthless internal wind.