The story is
red like a heart.
I broke against
the current
season with six
strong lights.
Chance holds you
or breaks you.
Your light
came on
intermittently.
I walked ramparts like B.,
trailing a burning
white dress.
A lot of voices
inside me.
A lot of lengths,
phrases of all turns,
sizes like yarn
bits and
string coiled in
wooly, fuzzy
skeins. Be
my wicker basket.
Be two
hands held high
as fleece is
drawn within
a new,
precarious
boundary. Be every-
one and every-
thing, every
method of
era and
dwelling. Explain
dormancy, a sensitive
air the fingers
bear within the
problem’s
heat. Break
the book’s
spine, the exoskeleton
of the book.
Be kind. Bear
good will, even to Aunt
Reed. A lamp
flares.
Glaring light.
What happens to
power in a
central body?
As if I
held shawls
to my face,
the attic
of the mind.
I am also
plain and little.
It is not
mild when I
thump my
wild coat, the snow
shaking from my
breast. There
is this snow
in England. I am not in
England.
Jenny Drai has work appearing or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Aesthetix, Horse Less Press, Spittoon, Spork, La Petite Zine, and The Volta, among other journals. Her chapbook, The New Sorrow is Less than the Old Sorrow, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She has recently completed a novel about Gilgamesh, polar bears, Jesus, and kung fu. She works in a department store.