Jenna Le
Carnival Story
As per self-help cliche,
intangibles trump gear:
good memories outweigh
a plastic souvenir;
experience is worth
more than all things on earth.
Once, in my early youth,
my prudent mom restrained me
when the face-painting booth
at the town fair inflamed me
with hopes of overhauling
a self I found appalling.
"That booth's a waste of cash,"
she scoffed. "Why let them splash
clown makeup on your cheeks?
Those dirty daubed-on streaks
will wash off in the bath
and leave no aftermath."
Instead, we used the final
red ticket in my hoard
to buy a hairbrush, vinyl-
embellished rigid board
with bristles sharp as spears….
It's served me thirty years.
Diabetes Test
After the blood draw, I sighed, "Fingers crossed,"
to which the young phlebotomist replied,
"Pray to the glucose gods!" I walked outside,
my previously nervous mind now lost
to musings theological: who knew
such deities existed? Lords assigned
not to all sugars but to just one kind,
Olympians whose cragged peak pricks the blue,
who sit on crystal thrones placed in a ring
(how many of them are there?), governing
by dour committee fiat just how few
or many chains of carbon we are blessed
to harbor floating in our blood? Just who
might these gods be? What offerings please them best?
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea's inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and many other journals. She has a B.A. in mathematics and an M.D. and works as a physician and educator in New York City. |
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Jane Blanchard
Barbara Lydecker Crane
Mary Cresswell
Barbara Crooker
Sarah-Jane Crowson
Claudia Gary
Julia Griffin
Mia Schilling Grogan
Kathryn Jacobs
Jen Karetnick
Jean L. Kreiling
Jenna Le
Kathleen McClung
Diane Lee Moomey
Leslie Schultz
Natalie Staples
Kathrine Varnes
Joyce Wilson
Marly Youmans
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| Maureen Alsop:I often create visual art as a memorialization to the closure of a written work. However, many of these visual pieces arrived as a trajectory while writing a larger 'work-in-progress.' The text within the visual poems do not speak to the content of the larger work but are autonomous, acting as bridge between the written and visual bodies. The original text draws upon ghosts in the hall of battles. It is a glittering solar analemma, an unattested revolution, an infinity reflected in ellipses, omissions, and disintegration. A full collection representing many of these images came to fruition recently in Tender to Empress (Wet Cement Press). Yet the act of creating from text continues, as the digital collages here also include newer works based on miscellaneous notes, old emails, and most recently a short story, "The Unnamed Woman of Mary River" (forthcoming at South Dakota Review). The title to these are based on cargo ships which I pass on my daily commute from island to mainland. These small cities of people, afloat for weeks on end out at sea, are a looming story that embarks and disembarks in my imagination.
The visual poems are crafted under the mechanics of "Écriture Féminine," literally "women's writing." These principals advance a feminine perspective. I write from parallels, cyclical slips through stream of conscious and fragmentary processes. The writing exists as rough erotic. As talisman. Interpersonal in their ruptures and syntax, soft in their discomforts; a splintered narrative. Through writing, I can go anywhere and never be found.
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