Jesse DeLong
—
Somewhere There is a Reststop and She Might Choose It
for Keosha
She is lying on top of me, head sunken
into the unshaven opening of my neck,
hand pillowed where my ribcage
would shape through if I hadn’t been gaining
weight since turning thirty.
One of the thumbtacks holding
the bedsheet to the window as a curtain
has fallen
so that the light sways, patches, rubs
the white wall where we have hung no pictures.
She smells how a southern woman smells—
Dove deodorant, sweat, morning breath.
Her socked-foot rubs and tugs at my ankle,
her breasts are flattened against the white shirt
she bought me for my birthday.
As I breathe, deeply, conscious of my breath,
her shoulders rise with my chest’s rising,
her body’s movement a passenger
to my movement, and I am aware
of the direction I am taking her
in this poor little life,
I mean light,
of the new day.
That's It
for Keosha
There is something degenerative about you.
you get out of bed, into the single bulb of the bathroom.
your hair is tousled, your eyes, gin-shot.
skin-pocked and bags that look like bruises.
your face—a carcass bloated in heat.
the pale fat of your arms, red rashes under the elbows,
a few white pubic hairs but sienna in your mustache.
you are in your thirties now
and she loves you anyways.
that’s the whole poem.
that’s all it needs to be.
Sitting in the window booth of the City Café, I ignored the way Bird was folding her paper placemat into a crane by looking at my slight reflection. Across the street, a child, holding his rolled up jacket like a stuffed animal, was being forced into the backseat of a station wagon, which was filled with boxes. The license plate read from way out of state.
Perhaps because they don’t have home towns, just places
where they were born. Hollyhocks—the backyards
of Meridian, Mobile, Tuscaloosa. An array of spaces
they can’t call home, perhaps because they can’t place towns
like these into any one area of their lives—a blur of basements,
kitchens, the small dirt lots where the earth is hard.
Doesn’t the world, perhaps, have towns that are just places
where hollyhocks are born? The back of all backyard.
The refrain line for this triolet adapts language from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
Jesse DeLong debut poetry book, The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, was published by Baobab Press. Other work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings, and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press. Other than writing, he teaches composition and literature at Louisiana State University.
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