Wings

I borrowed a nun costume for the first Halloween party. No one spoke
to me. Some party guests began to dip their heads in gin. Others spoke
of Central America. Wait, I said. I am Unitarian. They ate potato chips
and pretended not to hear. The Statue of Liberty in corporate chains
fell in love with the African bridegroom.

The second year I got a small bag of potato chips and a tube of super
glue and went as a woman with a chip on her shoulder. Toward the
end of the night the drunken hostess bit the chip in half. Half a chip
is better than no chip, she said, which I think of every time I see that
shirt in the closet.

I went as a grasshopper the third year. It was a joke. One of my friends
called me Grasshopper, from that TV show. I ran out of time to make
a body. I wore a green jogging suit and wings. The wings were wide
and I walked from room to room, knocking potato chips onto the
floor. Cassandra had spent three hours getting her hair curled. When
Dmitri asked me to dance I left my wings on a chair.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Compost Reader

You are a person of contradiction. Observe the pomegranate, the way
each seed has been extracted. Of course, the presence of pomegranate
denotes patience, passion, self-indulgence. But see how the seeds are
not so much scooped as torn from their rough and broken cavities.
And the dark coffee grounds still in the unbleached filter: obviously
you miss your best friend from fourth grade, the one with lavender
tissues in her shiny purse. Hmmmm, eggshells. Not tucked into each
other like passengers on a train, but scattered far from their mates.
Here, a pile of moth-webbed cornmeal, hot pepper seeds, potato eyes,
beet roots. Quick to anger. And these red-soaked slices of orange,
spiked by cloves? Dinner party. You’re afraid of the dark. Look at the
layers of leaves–they were not raked in fall, but scooped out from
under snow to cover eleven baby roses and the charred skin of a
butternut squash. It’s not so much that you miss your friend and her
rhinestone barrettes, her sisters with J-names. You wanted to be her.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Dangers of Miso Soup

I don’t trust miso soup, she says, and ominous music begins to play in
the background as she pushes her soup away with long rust-colored
mails, miso soup sloshing innocently in its painted bowl, although,
suspiciously murky, hiding strips of seaweed. Even later, when she
tells me what she meant was I am vegetarian, and sometimes Japa-
nese restaurants stir fish paste into their miso soup, I can’t stop the
movie from playing: courageous heroine leaps from her car–escape
facilitated by her unclasped seatbelt–and then! no time to scream,
miso soup in close pursuit, she runs down the street in stilettos, flowy
sleeves billowing like smoke from a gun, miso soup closing in, white
paddle-spoon clattering.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Death Wish

When this Ultralight fell onto the bare tips of pines, hikers saw the
flare of yellow jacket billow like a parachute. His body arrived at the
airport in CARGO, a family comforted that He died doing what he loved.
Dearly beloved, say this, too, about me. Let me die bent ass naked over
the kitchen table, let my last words be Oh. Baby. Say, She loved that
position. Let me fall face-first into a book. Say, She died on that page.
Or eating chocolate–let the mortician wipe dark cake from my lips,
roll me into the crematorium heart-stopped and sticky.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He Calls Her Etsy

The wire man springs off the metal pot filled with Spanish moss. Not
that he needs to sit, with those trellis legs upright, the effort it takes
to bend something like a knee, but he’s been with the boiled wool
woman, admiring her seams and the way her waist makes a crook. She
can’t stand on her own but she leans with grace on the glass emerald
bonsai list with sunlight that goes right through him. She absorbs the
light, has a fullness the wire man can’t stop thinking about. If she says
yes, he thinks, they will make love under the emerald tree, his sharp
edges curved in, her rippable skin warm under her heart-pocket dress.
Later he will make her a mouth.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.