I am the author of four collections of poetry including Slap Leather (dancing girl press), Sisi and the Girl from Town (Finishing Line Press), Dust Runner (Finishing Line Press), and Tender, Tender (Headmistress Press). Tender, Tender, my most recent collection, won the 2021 Charlotte Mew Prize.
I’ve also edited two collections: Speak a Powerful Magic (Kent State University Press) and I Hear the World Sing (Kent State University Press). Her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, American Poetry Journal, and Nimrod among others.
recent publications:
joshua 7:22 in the ruins
Love in Winter as Explained by Quantum Entanglement
Tonight, as the light snow falls, tell yourself
that you are loved even if you are not sure.
Our moon is out there, yes, & adored, but so
is her twin who is smiling in the cold, quiet,
nova pink light of another universe. No one
has seen her, except in the timeless dark
of dreams. She tells herself that someone loves
her—a child, maybe, who once fell from her
ridges & floated away & is out there with happy
memmories of her & everything is connected, baby—
can’t you see it now? It’s so clear, like this snow
tonight & she’s out there humming song you
once heard in a cathedral & that’s when you knew
that love is tethered to all times, old & new, & that music
is cathedral of the faithful stars & let’s live now.
Adoration in the Form of Adoration
and I said to the star, ‘consume me.’
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
At meridian, the friar plum passes between my hand and your mouth.
We use the passing to tell time in stages of ripening.
Time, we think, is measured in the pull of flesh to clingstone.
A taste? You ask, your tongue spilling out words soft as moonlight on a tranquil lake.
Ephemeral, emptiness is not filled with years, but with the desire to see one body overlap another body.
Alone we are no more than air—carbon, neon, remnants of galactic dust from the first starbirth.
We find the missing origins in the single breath our mouths share, consuming.
We saw the distant observers once but did not know the visible light was the light of our future selves.
Taste this plum from my mouth. Is it not sweet?
Measurement
…that we are not allowed romance but only its distance
—Linda Gregg
It’s always been this way—
using the body as a unit of
measurement. Sixteen hands.
Just a hair. As delicate
as a hummingbird’s wing.
Two fingers on ice. The first
ruler came out of the Indus
Valley five millennia ago. Think
about how far away that is.
Think about how they saw
their world, let alone measured
it. Think about the persimmons
growing in those ancient orchards.
Think about their red sweetness.
I think about how far away
from me you still feel & I get a little sad
like exhausting too many octaves
screaming at the moon when you leave
for your eight-mile drive back home.
How do we love a fathom away?
How many miles do we have left to go?
Tips for Surviving an Arizona Monsoon
—Tombstone City Council, 1881
1. Bobcats also wait out storms in caves.
2. Learn the sound of a Cooper Hawk’s cry.
3. When the wind picks up and the air cools, a storm is coming.
4. Never stop in a rumbling arroyo or tent at the bottom of a hill.
5. Unhook your horses before they buck free. They’ll find their way back to you.
6. When the horizon darkens, don’t ever take your eyes away from the sky.
7. Bury your belt, gun, reins, tools, and your wife’s jewelry two feet into the clay.
8. If your hair rises up on your scalp, lightning is about to strike you.
“Tips for Surviving an Arizona Monsoon” by Jessica Jewell, from Slap Leather. Dancing Girl Press, 2011.
HOW THE BALATON WINE SURVIVED
Most of the soil takes in the seeds
and what are left darken
into the volcanic loam. One sunbeam
each for the sprouts. The wind empties
out of the lake and climbs the sharp
hillsides. At the top, the church bell
announces Sunday lunch. Startled,
Ágnes Varga drops the bowl of peas.
Something you might call happiness
is happening now. A century ago
every vine from here to Szekszárd
was nibbled away by the phylloxera bugs.
This was before the Emperor was murdered.
Before the bombings left wide gapes
in the monastic cellars and most of the village
men were sent to the front. Before
widows and mothers who mourned
had nothing left to nourish but a grape.
ANCIENT HUNGARIAN
I had already been in the air for fourteen hours
the day we met. Fourteen hours and six meals
and three bags of miniature wheat pretzels
that tasted like Pennsylvania Dutch hand-crafted
cardboard and someone's salty fingertips.
Six meals and three bags of pretzels and four
still waters because once I saw a story
about how drinking wine on the plane
can dehydrate you and soda in any form
can make your stomach explode. You brought lilies
with stems longer than your whole upper body
that covered your face and bark-brown eyes.
Through the Danube and into your arms, fourteen
hours from Ohio and the gas station
where I left my sunglasses before buying two packs
of gum so my ears wouldn't explode at 35,000 feet.
You held me and I felt another world in your arms,
coming home again after four generations.
The Roman stonemasons and mad mathematicians,
the Turks and Germans storming the Bastian,
the peasant revolts, the banned playwrights
and revolutionaries, churchgoers and landowners,
the metals miners, student bakers, the women
who hid the vines in the monastic cellars away
from the Russians or the bombs or the taxmen.
You wrapped yourself over my ancient Hungarian,
modern America skeleton. Fourteen hours
in the air across the ocean and mountains
and there the cool waters of Duna and the bygone.
END OF BLACKBERRY SEASON
Nógrád, Hungary
This morning the rooster’s lungs strain
a cockled melody as if late summer
sets on his vocal chords. In the fields,
the fattened blackberry buds bow to the grass,
and the honeybees nearly stand on their heads
suckling the pink nectar wingside. Inside
my host family sleeps, as do the farm workers
and the mare who needs tending in the barn.
The village dogs that spent the night
moon-howling rest now in thin alleys
of dawn, though the intercity train
briefly disturbs their dreams of running.
A Tin Heron nests on the gunpowder ruins
above the cellars someone carved into the hills,
half a century ago
to protect the wine from the bombs