B. FULTON JENNES

B. Fulton Jennes, the 2025 Subnivean Awards winner in poetry, has won the International Book Award for Blinded Birds, as well as the Lascaux Prize and New Millennium Award. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies including CALYX, Comstock Review, december, Extreme Sonnets, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse for her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. She is Poet Laureate Emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts the monthly Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners reading series. You can also find her here: https://www.facebook.com/BFultonJennesPoetry/

FATHER-DAUGHTER DIRGE

Three days after she was born, you danced

the swaddled cocoon of her in your arms.

You wept, told her The next thing I know,

we’ll be dancing at your wedding.

The last time you danced with her, she was

blue-lipped. Ashen. Needle beside her on the floor.

You hauled her up, clutched her to your chest,

reeled her around the room in a paso-doble dirge.

Her head lolled, nearly nodding, as you begged

her to live again. And I, Demeter, called 911,

made you lay her flat, breathed her lips back

to pink, watched eyelids flutter.

You slumped, sapped, until summoned

by the approaching wail.

I once saw Baryshnikov dance Coppelia.

He flew, hovered aloft, a man-bird, godlike.

I thought I’d never see a man dance

with that ferocity again. Later I read

that each time the dancer bounded off-stage,

women replaced his blood-soaked slippers

as he collapsed, helpless,

until called to dance again.

COUNTING PAST LOVERS IN MY HEAD

Sometimes I get 12, sometimes 13, have to start

counting again, struggling to put a name to a face,

like trying to recall the Seven Deadly Sins or

Three Fates—who spins the thread? Measures?

Cuts? The lover who bought me purple irises

at a 14th Street bodega a month before my wedding

is easiest to remember. Drunk, I left deep scratches

on his back and he cursed me the next morning,

How do you expect me to hide these from my wife,

had me douse the marks with rubbing alcohol

as if the stain would wash off. The professor made

me memorize the names of the Nines Muses

but I forgot them as soon as he stopped calling.

I always forget Pride, the least sinly-seeming of sins,

like I always forget the man 30 years my elder, gentle

and soft-spoken—the least lover-seeming of lovers.

Two of them left me when I said I love you. One

came out as gay. The one I left home for wanted it

rough, bent me backwards, wracked my lower spine.

He died of a ruined liver. So much to remember,

so much to forget. Mnemosyne, goddess of memory,

birthed the Nine Muses. A stream bearing her name

runs through Hades. Parallel flows the River Lethe

from which the dead drink to forget. Sometimes

they quaff the wrong water, remember it all.

I'VE EATEN MORE CROW THAN CAVIAR

which is to say I wear a prayer shawl of regret

which is to say apologies abound in my mouth

which is to say my lips are worthless dams.

Can I tell you how the crow claws and pecks

at my throat, bloats my belly, creates black coal

in my gut? Can I tell you how sorry I am?

How many apologies fill a phone message?

An envelope? A casket? Which weighs more:

an ounce of penitence or a pound of crow?

Yesterday, a boy about to shoot his schoolmates

texted I’m sorry to his mother. Yesterday, I muttered

I’m sorry to my mother, but she was already dead.

The time I ate caviar, salty tapioca on my tongue,

I thought good girls don’t put this in their mouths.

The time I ate caviar, I spit it out into a napkin.

I spit it out and said, I’m sorry, I don’t like it.

I spit it out and promised to be a good girl.

No one heard me. I spit the words in my head.

I regret making a promise I couldn’t keep,

all the apologies I’ve spit, all the crow-coal

stuck in my gut. I regret my mother died.

Did I tell you I’m weary of wearing this shawl?

Did I tell you my lips are bruised fruit?

Did I tell you crow tastes like caviar?

I SLEPT IN FRANKIE'S BEDROOM

when he was away at Boy Scout Camp. It was up a winding staircase

from the kitchen, his unmade bed crammed under an eave, a cheap

chest of drawers slouched against the far wall. I heard bees in the walls

and smelled Frankie on the pillow—not sweet or minty like shampoo,

but dark like his hair. His smell made Frankie mine for the night. //

Frankie kept to himself in that tiny room, the maid’s quarters

from when the Hogans’ rundown rental was still a fine country home.

I listened from the other side of the door, playing Barbie with his

sister Kathy, roused by the leaden smell of solder as Frankie

assembled Radio Shack kits, envious as he tapped out Morse code

messages to someone, somewhere. Once I wondered aloud if he

was talking to a girlfriend, but Cynthia—five years my elder and

Frankie’s twin—snorted Frankie doesn’t like girls as she read

an Archie comic on her bed. // The day after graduation, Frankie left

for the Navy. I never saw him again, never once heard his name

mentioned in that house. Cynthia got the cancer and died. After that,

the Hogans divorced and moved out. That’s how things slip away. //

For years, I wondered where Frankie was—on the sea? Below it?

Sometimes on quiet nights, I’d scroll through bands on my father’s

shortwave radio, pause at Morse blips and beeps, imagine I heard waves

or smelled Frankie’s dark. Once I heard a voice that might have been his.

THE LOSS OF SMALL THINGS

A low bolt of black through black night,

a sickening thud—you knew to stop the car.

We stood beside the kitten sleep-still

on the gravel, looked from house to house.

Need help? A voice behind the approaching

flashlight. I think I killed your cat, sir. 

The man entered our headlights, naked

but for shorts bearing up his belly, snorted

Fucking cats. Worse than rabbits, picked up

the gaunt body by its hind legs, held it

in the flashlight’s beam—an obstetrician

ready to rouse a baby’s first breath—

then flung it into high grass. Forty years on,

you recount that small death as a nightmare

you’ll never shake. Not so much killing

the cat, you say, as the way he hurled it

out of the way. I remember that same look

on your face from decades past when I

met you back in the clinic waiting room,

the tiny interloper flung from our path.

BACK TO ISSUE 12