Rain blessed the county this year & the Los Angeles River flushed out nearly 13,000 pounds of mattresses, carts, turpentine, steak knives, bottle caps, opioids, & bald, eyeless doll heads onto shorelines as far as Seal’s Beach. All that the Valley had chucked was laid bare, was picked through by a volunteer Cleanup Brigade—like readers parsing a gnarl of poems. Even primordial Styrofoam from my decades-old Walkman box was exposed—the dirt over the white had finally eroded. Even this piece of former me mingled with the rush, the beached. Then—Jim on the crew stabbed & stuffed it into an orange bin, fed the full bin to mealworms. Then—some county hand fed that toxin-less feedstock to fowl, to farmed fish. Oh! I remember hurling it from mom’s Nova—at her live-in boyfriend invasion: at Mustache Tony & Butch, at the young guy I worked with at Home Depot & Red-Head smiles, at Old Cowdude & Pathological Paul. & when Pathological Paul moved out—a rush of tears blessed my face & began to dislodge them all.
Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include Object Lesson (Lily Books) and The Fool (Big Table). She's also released the teaching resource Object Lesson: A Guide to Writing Poetry (Lily Books). Her poetry, prose, and co-translations have appeared in: POETRY Magazine, Waxwing Journal, Rattle Magazine, Crab Creek Review, DMQ Review, On the Seawall, Salamander, The Common, and more. She's been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a Disquiet FLAD Fellowship from Dzanc Books, and an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. As well, she is the translations editor at Talking Writing, a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, and a co-translator of Arabic poetry and organizer for the Her Story Is collective. Jennifer is the new Manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's Online Writing Program.
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