Jehanne Dubrow’s
work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, Shenandoah, and Gulf Coast.
She is the author of a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry collection, The Hardship Post, won the 2007 Three Candles Press First Book Prize and was published in 2008.
These poems come from a manuscript entitled Stateside, which examines her experiences as a Navy wife. The middle section of the collection transplants Penelope to the 21st century. The queen’s twenty-year vigil for Odysseus comes to embody the difficult qualities that most military wives are expected to possess: patience, chastity, and the belief that the soldier-husband will return from war.
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At the Mall with Telemachus
First, he’s pouting for
French fries, a chocolate shake,
a toy from Burger King,
and what a big mistake
if she doesn’t give in—
a fit of temper in
the food court, his legs a blur
of speed, ten out of ten
on the tantrum scale,
his voice an ambulance
at siren pitch, my god
the screaming, the stridence
of his lungs, how long he holds
each note, melismatic
as a mystic in a trance,
or how his body’s frantic
with its tick-tick-ticking,
a toddler bomb about
to blow that cannot be
defused although she shouts
at him to stop, just stop
this nonsense now, and all
the mothers watching her
embarrassment, appalled
but so relieved he’s not
their son, not theirs to spank
or bargain with or bribe,
their little brat to yank
past Toys R Us and drag
away, while he grabs hold
of fistfuls of the greasy air
and cannot be consoled.
Penelope, Pluperfect
Before she had peppered
salt across her wrist,
had wrestled the heart
from its choke, had soaked
tea leaves for prophecy,
had seen a siren there,
had seen green sea, a god,
had sipped the afterward,
had tipped it down her throat,
had throttled it, had rapped
the egg to chip the shell,
had spooned the yolk from
its white bed, she licked
the liquid nova spilling gold
Odysseus, Sleeping
Penelope barely dozed,
while he lay still
as a coiled rope
or a windmill
waiting for the wind
to spin its sails. Until
he shifted in a dream,
she sometimes feared
that he had died
already. His beard
was tarnish on his skin.
She often peered
beneath the sheet to watch
his fingers twitch
with lightning storms
in miniature, bewitched
by how his body—
like a sudden glitch
inside the circuitry
—was both at rest
and perching on the edge
of action, his chest
held half between two breaths.
Who could have guessed
that soon he would become
a motion made
perpetual, a strange
machine afraid
to slow, to pause, to stop
its turning blade?
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