Tag: tupelo press

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jennifer Militello’s “Body Thesaurus”

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Body Thesaurus

In your dream, the act of breathing is a red-headed girl
with a body lactose-pale and livid against the skin
of water. A crack along the porcelain cup of this,
colored all absinthe with you. The closed white shutters

of your backbone as you sleep toward wrists spilling
their listless snowflakes farther south. Mouth:
night’s lilacs branching insolubly. Hair hissing, stems.
Mouth: the hospital: your houses are asking chemicals

out of the dark. Your lids are the lime-lined,
impromptu graves of thieves. As a mind,
your body is a wall of leaves; let its edges whisper
a collage of liquids singing, lips, the sangria weeds.

 

This selection is from Jennifer Militello’s book Body Thesaurus, available from Tupelo Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jennifer Militello is the author of Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, Flinch of Song (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets 2008.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

 

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jennifer Militello’s “Autobiography Toward a Study of the Thousand Wounds”

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Autobiography Toward a Study of the Thousand Wounds

Doctor, this is my diary. It begins with my confession to you.

I was hung before my throat could cry the rivers. I was hung
like an animal and the rope had a bite: when I touch, I touch
a razor of teeth, an amen on the edge of each of them. I am
adrift. I can see the pier with the loose rope fallen. I can see the
fog and the oars that will not last. I have eyes that are lanterns
so I will not wreck. And yet I cannot steer myself toward land. I
am at the end of risk. I am at the end of my fragmenting hands.
I only have nerves to tell me how far. I only have nerves; the
rest of me is ill.What I twist into rears toward frost. I twist into
the immigrant rain. I am again at sea, made sick with floating.
As it is, I am rich with different versions of myself, and I do not
know an antidote for me.

I am an impossible equation proven to exist.With the ache of
layers yet to peel off, made of features and a clockwork heart
whose mechanism breaks as death sits, wreckage in the face,
smells foul, and is blackened. Accidental fracture is a gift.

What I see is not so much a lost figure as an arch of rain, so
many windows, and an expression like wool. What I see is not
so much the fields of me as the silver beneath, the skeleton,
its trace elements, as one falls to the hands and knees. What I
see is not so much the childhood collapse or the stories the
sea-branches cherish and break, or the way I move air in front
of me from its delicate weave. What I see is a child’s breath at
the shoulder like a thief. A chemistry of sin that earns our keep.
That makes of me an enemy when the enemy is scarce.

I cannot remember my guilt, my personal plague is one of
indifference: my house is built of ill dreams, a desire to do harm,
the sick art of the act. The struggle is a thing I scrape free:
random cloaks or shadows across my lips that keep what I say
as the oath I have sworn. What I would have said terrifies
the masses. What I would have said threatens with the large hand,
with planets askew, with what I knew was wrong from the
moment I thought it.

Doctor, there are too many nests for me. To list. To sit and see.
To frequent. To invent. I count them out, sticks and rakes, ribs
and rags, a fathom I can wreck. To sense. To taste. These are the
prophecies where the whisperings can live. I sift them and wait.
I shake them and end. I am the land. By the flesh of the world,
I crush and flee. I seize and cry. I am the mind of me. I singe
and crave. The nothing of me crude. I am soothed from it.

 

This selection is from Jennifer Militello’s book Body Thesaurus, available from Tupelo Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jennifer Militello is the author of Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, Flinch of Song (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets 2008.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jennifer Militello’s “Interview Under Hypnosis”

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Interview under Hypnosis

Describe what you would have seen had the roosters
woken you closer to dawn.

Late August already. The jagged at their sins.
God crouching at the labor of us, us crouching

at the labor of ourselves, with iron rods sewn
inside our clothes to keep our glass bodies

from breaking. Listening shivers at
the nerve endings. Things unfailingly cringe.

Describe being endangered.

I hear reasons not to cry but I am crying to feel
the cold come in like an illness that will recover me.

A bruise finds me, a bruise knows where I sleep:
the pear’s sickly skin the color of a throat,

ravines that sing where ravines never were,
the sky in igneous ropes.

Describe being unreal.

When I finally woke, what was the world
but sleep. Graveyards where the wind is why,

wild as cursive and motorcycle-stark and white
as a gown of waiting. I am melting toward a world,

the small belly, into vivid such-liquids and
a disguise of lavishes. October lacerations.

The neon nears. No one tells me what
to believe and for once I believe in nothing


This selection is from Jennifer Militello’s book Body Thesaurus, available from Tupelo Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jennifer Militello is the author of Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, Flinch of Song (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets 2008.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jennifer Militello’s “Phobia”

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Phobia

I cannot choose. The world is too old.
On my knees before the first leaves to open.

I listen at the gaps in the floorboards
for someone who is listening for me,

but all I find is a death that looks like
the seed for something soft.

I remember rooms speaking back and forth.

I barely eat for fear of poison.
Species of homicide catch in my throat.

Into somewhere all the channels
are slipping, the near migration and the voice.

I only understand pain by what peels
from me when the heat is too much,

as if when the wind came for the pines
I called it good, I called it a form

of cathedral. I say no to a house
made mostly of eaves: no one

lives there. The wind lets no one in.

 

This selection is from Jennifer Militello’s book Body Thesaurus, available from Tupelo Press. Purchase your copy here!

 

Jennifer Militello is the author of Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, Flinch of Song (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets 2008.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Jennifer Militello’s “Personality State: Persephone”

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Personality State: Persephone

I have seen the silhouettes that bring me heavens,
I have seen my torso, in hours of torn,
ripple laden with captivity, rent with cries
and the sky’s white sheet drying in the wind,
weeping, a splash of oceans gone by, reeds,
and rains reciting an archery of wounds.

The twinned nights. In one I cry, in one
I recite historic tales. In both I never sleep.
My hands have the skulls of hawks. They prey
on those small bodies; they are blind, eyeless,
stars show them the way. Their sockets
see four winds as the directions of the earth.
Men on horseback. Forests asleep with the drums
at their hearts. The sky tells of its hooks.

*

Cast the spells that wend me shut. Sew cloaks
of cartilage for gathering courage. Bend the hand
where it moans in place. Pry open the jaws
of an average wolf and infest it with your breath.

Do not speak in riddles. Do not speak for days.
I have seen myself dead at the hands of the sea.
I have seen myself trembling beneath a streetlamp
while my waist cried out, while my eyes were black
as mandolins and dawn was the fall of breaking glass.

*

Punishment: carnivorous, its sunflower’s wilt.
The caged bird empties its image into wind,
its small heart a tambourine, its black tongue
a gypsy cymbal counting out the rain
into the gloom ripening at a gull’s pupil.
My hands, pale as ferns underwater.

I know the hours’ mummification by heart.
Some mornings, chaste as corners, leave behind
their murmurs like nostalgia or need, to ghost them
with my own mudless scatter. When the sea runs barren
as the possible bones, when the names are gone
from the gravestones and cliffs, when the long dry dune
can decay us at last, November: a rhythm of bells.
Images of distance burn to death. Weathervanes
lean. The wheat has a wind-violence in it yet.

 

This selection is from Jennifer Militello’s book Body Thesaurus, available from Tupelo Press. Purchase your copy here!

Jennifer Militello is the author of Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker, Flinch of Song (Tupelo Press, 2009), winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and Best New Poets 2008.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.