14.2 / FALL / WINTER 2019

They used to inject women’s urine into rabbits to see if the rabbit’s ovaries changed. Yes, meant pregnant. Either way the rabbit died, but the term came to mean: You are pregnant. In Language Arts we learned this: A great rabbit created the world and a pantheon of 400 rabbits regulates Earth fertility.

  Grandpa never took off his rings. Grandpa watched me graduate. Grandpa was a poet Grandpa had rough hands. Grandpa used to smoke Too much On our little patio Or the balcony where he read. Grandpa read. Grandpa read good books. Grandpa was weird.

On a Sunday afternoon when she was five years old, in a sweet green park beside a wide river that flows slowly, with a stately burden of ducks and swans and geese, below a theater shaped like a large tent on the rise of a hill under the kind of sun that a summer day

_______ Jessica Reed’s chapbook, World, Composed (Finishing Line Press), is a dialogue with Lucretius about atoms. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, North American Review, Bellingham Review, New American Writing, DIAGRAM, Exposition Review, The Fourth River, and elsewhere.

SELF PORTRAIT AS EXIT SIGNS my eyes adjust inward to find the source of the screeching something always needs to be removed   even the word love can get stuck in the hinges   the mouth/the drain/the exit kept ajar by the tongue   stretching and pouring out words outrun by the begging that forms them   know that

Two days before my sister’s wedding, I sat on an exercise ball in her living room while she laughed at me. I melted into the ball, having given up at even the concept of balance. “Ugh. This thing is not meant for people with boobs, is it?” I said. “No. I hate having big boobs.

It starts with a harvest moon on a swipe-right, bend-over night. A moon that is too big for the sky, that has outgrown the solar system and wants more like you want more. You sketch the moon large at first. Across six poster boards taped together on a conference room table.

for people like us For us, renegade is the word we scribble in between dead trees growing in our hair, because to face the madness of this country, we must learn to label ourselves one thing, before they shut us out with it.

My daughter wants in on the pussyhat. She watches as my fingers dip like pigeons, each bamboo stick striking a hole. Push / thrust / invert / then / again. Her little body thrills at the color pink. She will tell it to anyone: My favorite color is pink and purple.

Most days the house of my body is my guardian and friend but today it turns slowly against me, minute by minute, I can feel the stirrings in my gut, the skipped heartbeat, the sweat gathering on my brow.  Perhaps only my defenses against some foreign agent?  But this attack is from the inside out.

On November 20th, 1980, a Texaco oil rig accidentally drilled into a salt mine under Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur, permanently altering the natural ecosystem and rendering the once freshwater body saline.   LAKE PEIGNEUR SPEAKS TO THE OIL RIG before the salt, I do not remember.

I went to grade school with a girl who had the world’s tiniest paper shredder above her lips. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was an oddly symmetrical scar or maybe a pale mole. But we knew what it was. When our teacher Ms.

Words have colors.  Names have colors too.  Cousin Jimmy’s is green like pear skin.  Neighbor Patty’s is red like cold, tomato juice.  Friend Norma’s is pale, yellow like pineapple flesh. Right now I’m standing on the highest balcony of the tallest building in the city with Renee.  Hers is sienna.  Sienna like a brick.

The ground is wet and I am light and the holes I’ve dug and filled line the edge of the yard. Inside, I scrub the soil out from under my fingernails. A garden requires patience, so I wait. The dog scratches at the door and whines.

Fetch At forty-five kilos I was small like a big dog, twenty-five moles from bum up like twenty-five moments of skin rapture like twenty-four dribs of black sky and a gasp; you pressed your ear against one of them, said something in it was singing or at least that’s how I remember – you singing

I forgot about your mother’s fig preserve.  I didn’t even realize what was in the jar until I opened it and saw the slivers of lemon in with the figs.  I ate all the lemon and half of the figs yesterday and I finished the figs today.

You said these are coyotes not wolves and my anger shrunk to an egg I could swallow or drown. What I took—fire, flood, and field. To believe, to dream, only in extremes, you will wear yourself out, you said, I’m sorry, I was drifting.