Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary magazine, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a lecturer at San Diego State University. Her most recent collection of poetry, After the Tour, is available now from Calypso Editions, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Spillway Journal, Cider Press Review, and others. Visit jennyminnitishippey.com for more.
A Process Note
I’m interested in private vocabularies, private languages at work in lyric poems. There is, in the particularity of image, an assertion of individuality: only this speaker could have made the images of this poem; what emotions you draw from the arrangement of images are yours. I’m also fascinated by how pursuing a sound through a poem can add energy, mystery. When a sequence of sounds “makes sense” to me, I’m generally inclined to leave it, even if it creates unlikely connections between images or narrative points. I haven’t thought of this as “difficulty” before, but I can see the ways it asks the reader to be involved in the meaning-making of a poem. I see also how important it is to me to use my own, particular, private language in the writing of these pieces.
*
Last Days of June
A whole sun-skinned nation
later and I am on my knees
in the trolley, the trolley south
bound, everything dark and rattling—
June in this country comes
jacarandad and sky-bruised—and me
wailing hallelujah quite
silently, good-bye brave ponies
grazing in the green wind, good-
bye thin socks abandoned
to the soft mercies of rain,
good-bye plastic peonies on the high
heels of happiness.
I am trying, just try
ing to love this again, my life.
*
Questions for Adam
What is love to you: the walls,
beyond the walls,
the garden, beyond the garden, the alley—
what of the words you made,
that avocado pitted,
that dog wriggling on the carpet,
that poetic form,
shorelines unmourned,
in what bright east heaving ocean you buried
your feet—
wanderer, o wanderer,
you ribless, you gutted, you
black-haired belovéd first,
what of ash stockpiled in the sideroom,
what of our mother dust,
our Juliet balcony, our aloe vera,
bright green walls and our red bookcase—
what is love to your black-penned vision
made in the shape of a god,
or some kind of cloud,
cumulous or nimbus,
what is love to your silence,
click-clack the machines of your dreams,
uncut nails of the Airedale terriers,
string of patio lights hung by your here-now
generosity, what of the garden? What of
what is beyond—
*
Third Tour
there’s waiting, then wait and
how dare you take so long to get here,
air blasted past dust and dusty blinds,
detonation of overripe, out-seasoned
vine-grown tomatoes, so
come through, blown open:
I’ll make tea, pay half the bills,
we’ll census dead birds and marvel
at their eyes still, still
unblinking into us
*
Sig Sauer
she put a gun in my hand why else would I hold it? I wanted her the flags were half-masted I wanted her so I held it tell me about your war I wanted her gun in my hand, that not-heavy darkness tell me your war, have you fed it? here on my knees in the desert a weightless dark in my hand on my knees and wailing, a gun on my knees in the desert what danger in the market? on my knees wailing a gun in the purse, in her hand what danger a market for desire, mark the prices her hand inside me a gun her gun inside, my desire for every desire, a price put a gun in our hearts the trigger will pull us the flags are half masted we desire our war
*
When my dead meet they hold hands
In the land of Linnea and of Sarah
red bougainvillea blossoms
by whipping wind are blown
through the heavy oak door.
The wind blows also through light-bodies.
This one has eyes
she speaks
On the left, she has a voice
she watches
They crowd me.
Breasts press against my elbows
warm palms in my back’s hollow
a tongue in the dark of my mouth.
A jade-green hummingbird in the red arbor,
wings shiver wings in my hair
they whisper
as they lean close above me
as they stay.
Why
are the straw hats in the middle of the highway? I shout.
Memory replaces nothing, not
brown eyes or blue, not
blonde hair or
bones or skin.
to my dead, living
to my dead, living jade-green
to my living dead, jade-green