SPELL FOR ELSEWHERE
An angry bleat urges me to fasten the seatbelt, metronomic click
of the blinker punctuating its screech-song. The windows are down
& the rain drips onto my thighs. It brings me back to the body
in spatters. On the highway, I let three people merge & not one
waves. I am out of wiper fluid again & get lost on Ward Parkway.
A different me is silhouetted in the lit windows of every house I drive
past – me: reading a book, me: making dinner, me: alone staring back.
A. N. DEJESÚS is a proud second-generation Dominican-American poet and technical writer working out of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems appear in the Los Angeles Review, Permafrost, Bear Review, Cider Press, Luna Luna Magazine, and the Best of the Net Anthology (2019), among others. She has recently earned a Master of Arts in English Literature and Rhetoric from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was the recipient of the Helen and Emily Nguyen Creative Award and attended a fellowship at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
Read more by A. N. DeJesús
Author’s Website
Poem at The Growler (audio)
On Twitter at @amand_nah
Poetry by A. N. DeJesús, Radka Thea Otípková, Sara Moore Wagner, Patricia Zylius, Pavla Melková, Angela Topping, Jessica Q. Stark, Karel Šebek, Eric Nelson, and M. Nasorri Pavone. Fiction by Sarah Rose Haughn, Genta Nishku, Lucy Tunstall, Petra Hůlová, Paweł Sołtys, Vratislav Kadlec, and Zach Murphy. An interview with Atomic Culture. Reviews of Eileen Cleary’s 2 a.m. with Keats and other books.
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
His astonishing, indeed quite singular ability to touch the tip of his nose with his teeth was something he discovered almost inadvertently
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
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Me, I’m the opposite, of course – my soul is in full view, as if it weren’t just my shirt that was ripped but my flesh too, and it’s right here, my clownish soul, winking at you with a tear in its eye, because like a steam engine it’s powerful and full of emotion at the same time.
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
The wildflowers wilt over their own feet as I stagger through the dusty, jaded soil. One of my legs is broken. My mouth is parched.
