That Smile
Male Questioner: is there ever a reason you’d have different footnotes
bottlecaps
on the same poem?
Swashbuckler: well there are many different versions of the same poem
and these will have different bottlecaps
on different words
I wanted to say I would live
to defend difference over and over
but I don’t like representations of should
as a ragged dustfroth sways
and notifies no spider
too broken to sustain this love
I’ve tried to save the satellites
as an old woman tests her face
when she sees herself on the computer
Beyond the Measure Principle
a screen blooms then fades, a little
moonrise against dawn
People often say timing
is off but they mean
time bloats
into military history, a schedule
I want to dart through
and bring others with me, passing
through words and other
inexactly repeated epistemological statements
Though trees aren’t
dense enough by the lake to summon
forest, still
puddles multiply their crowns
enough
biography
JENNIFER NELSON’s first book of poems, Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife, came out with Ugly Duckling Presse in Dec. 2015. The second, Civilization Makes Me Lonely, was chosen by Anne Boyer for the Sawtooth Prize and will appear from Ahsahta Press in the spring of 2017. Nelson’s other work has appeared recently in BathHouse, LIT, Wreck Park, and elsewhere. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.