JESSIE ASKINAZI

MISADVENTURED

His neutral wife
appears
up and over
the whaleback hills
a praise dancer
bowing
on slim ankles

while I
deliberately fall
to the floor
slicing my cheek
on apple scab

He knew
my name
before
I said it
aloud

we braved
the same home
invasion
and are
bound still—
chronic knot—
arms hugging legs
in an untraceable
basement

All he wanted
was an ungory
family
that settled
like dead cola
no burnt
edges

All I wanted
was to distill
an explosion
into something
I could catch
on my tongue

FURS

sometimes people                climb into dead animal skins for warmth instead i
             gauze myself in a sermon of your filled pauses though repose inside of a mammal
carcass                         sounds like ideal lamplight                         mooching off moth wings
but i’ve                         smelled enough vacant in my time                        it’s scented metallic
surprisingly and i don’t                      feel like stripping naked for yet another varsity
captain with diseased hoofs and you can’t                          stay dry anyway guts down to
your wrists up to your arms so                   burn into my chest on a slow wednesday all i
ever                  wanted was to                       shelter in a new cavity that was my tweak that
was advised by the board but                      fitting inside of a ribcage isn’t easy even for
someone as puckered as me                        be my sleeping bag before i                          forget
how to                         shut my eyes indefinitely instead of                       thawing in dead
horse body i               build an effigy of one to                   protest big creatures who never
             learned to                  outrun me

IT COST HER SPOONS

it doesn’t seem dark at night anymore

in fact, it doesn’t seem like/it sounds like

full house lied

and i have to ask if this is an essential gland

as my boots mount the outcrop

metal dragging a naughty spartan

there i expose vigilante lettering

to test the earth

asking if it can still be touched

because who needs hormones

when we can be flayed in punishment

they say i’m tangy but i know the truth

i may leave dishes out to rot

along with my inertia

we raise the dead and our children

to be cleaner versions of ourselves

RIP GULF

the frat house woke almost on cue
swallowing the prayer in my nullity

they say they do not dream in color
so i make a trail, not of breadcrumbs but of names

i had in other bodies before i was converted
to a makeshift house with no plumbing

nursing life support so my grandchildren won’t inherit
these lean shanks that peek through trousers

i sent an amber alert for my once self
do you hear the siren moaning

Jessie Askinazi’s poetry was most recently published in Dream Pop Press, where she was nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. In April, she participated on a panel about Jewish poetics for the New Orleans Poetry Festival. She has contributed words and photos to BUST Magazine, Bullett Media and Purple Magazine. Recently, she compiled a series of nearly 40 interviews for a retrospective book about the East Los Angeles Women’s Center. She is currently finishing a chapbook entitled Ear Tagging for Shirt Pocket Press. Catch her hosting The Crimson Coyote podcast.