Jennifer Reeser
is the author of An Alabaster Flask, winner of the Word Press First Book Prize, and Winterproof. Her poems, essays, and translations of Russian and French literature appear internationally in such journals as POETRY, Botteghe Oscure, Salt, The Formalist, and The Dark Horse.
Her work is gathered in numerous print and online anthologies, including Introduction to Poetry, edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, and Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets, The Alsop Review (which also produces her CD as part of its Spoken Word series), and Famous Poets and Poems Online.
She has received awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets and The Lyric magazine. In 2006, she was a member of the West Chester seminar on Russian/English translation, and was a finalist for the 2008 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize awarded by the University of Evansville.
She lives in southern Louisiana. Visit her website.
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How I Want You
In white—a complimentary robe, with wine,
Eighteen floors skyward, on an armless chair
In some sub-tropical hotel, your hair
Damp as you’re coming, fingers twined in mine;
Before you on my knees—but not in prayer;
With blanket views of pink and black flamingoes
Below us on the gravel going south
Eighteen flights down, my lips, my tongue and mouth
In speech that leaves you with a speechless groan,
The sotto strains of Pinzas and Domingos,
Dvořáks, brought to silence, speakers blown;
My right sole on an air conditioner
Beside our still-untumbled, unturned bed
Against clove-papered walls, your dripping head
Between my hips: the plosive connoisseur
Exploiting, lecture justified and deft,
As though you tasted sweet, concocted salve.
And I, I am escaping like I have
Nothing undiscovered in me left.
Then on the rented floor, a fleur-de-lis—
Silver and subtle—pending from my throat
In motion over you, a cunning coat
Of sweat between your cradling joints and me.
Inviolate and sacred I am not,
But cleaving, suckling, bringing you for good
Inside thin garter bands and thigh-high leggings,
Recalling practice tacit Rome forgot
In Illium’s abandoned vestal wood
By acquiescence and ignoble begging.
The pendant catching sun, then moonlight, dangles
Atop our rocking. Oh, my love, you say.
My feet are bare, the carpets hard to heel.
The room contains an endless count of angles,
And I want you—how I want you—any way
The reason can conceive, or heart can feel.
Blow
You come. I take it in, a stream
like brackish consciousness, or cream
unstrained by automatic mesh,
and uncorrupted with the flesh.
The breath goes weak from chants or prayer,
Well-managed hands in wind-writ hair
Below a belt the mind recants;
A tambourine’s repeated trance
Is in my thoughts and on my tongue.
We’re prime, aged—while the night is young,
And less illumined. What you feel
Is what you’ve never read. But real.
Fire Mount
Very in love, not leveling love very well,
I thrust a trowel, toss pepper, hoe and tell
How like a hill whose growth I can’t retard
Of ants, gray and aggressive in the yard,
It thrives: of even and its own volition.
My pesticides break down to superstition—
Original yet olden to observe
As the bold bore of long-told proverb.
When soil with poison in addition can’t
Eradicate the raisings of the ant,
At least one can admire the bitten pin-
Round boil it raises on a dirty shin,
So like a pristine pearl, that oyster bead
Resulting from a nearly fatal seed.
What if one found such things inside the pile?
Some precious ball designed of brawn and bile,
A polished billiard for their going nation
Built on the industry of irritation?
Preferred—but never banking in these fires
Does one disclose those brokerage desires.
The carcass of a swallow or canary
Alongside their production line, one very,
Very in love, not balancing its bite,
Must powder the mound with talc, then smother the site.
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