Jenene Ravesloot has written five books of poetry. She has published in After Hours Press, The Ekphrastic Review, Sad Girl Review, Packingtown Review, DuPage Valley Review, Caravel Literary Arts Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, The Miscreant, and other online journals, print journals, chapbooks, and anthologies. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations in 2018.
Backwards
we tunnel into soil—railroad worm to your
click beetle waving our brave colors like
war flags. We’re drunk on aphids, millipedes,
and bioluminescence.
Here we stir and thicken beneath the lights of
the long-horned beetles. Then, when we are
done, we slowly drift upwards until we take
human form again.
Jenene Ravesloot
The air buzzes with angry words
and too much ballyhoo. We know! One of us has to go. But who?
Forget those leather masks from Mexico. The faulty
suitcase won’t stay shut.
Your prized Seymore Rosofsky lithograph leans against the
bedroom wall; my rolled silk prayer rug from Nepal;
our favorite intaglio print. The faulty suitcase won’t stay shut.
The silverware and bric-a-brac are still unpacked. Stay or go.
We can’t decide. The air buzzes with angry words and too
much ballyhoo. The faulty suitcase won’t stay shut.
Jenene Ravesloot
Bio of Jane Richards
Jane Richards is a retired piano teacher with a passion for writing and nature. Her prose and poetry has appeared in online and print journals. She is a graduate of the creative writing masters program at Columbia College, Chicago.
Wolf Moon
She has been with us three nights—
under clear skies she emerges unblemished,
unrolls her luminous carpet across January snow,
her fingers tracing precise outlines—
tangled branches,
tree trunks in dark columns.
In these woods—
bones exposed,
mute,
our refuge from the bruises of loss—
we wait for the greening,
the hum of trees breathing.
The hour before dawn
the moon arrives at our window,
spreads strong hands across our bed.
Prodding us from old darkness
we awaken inside her canescent embrace,
trace the features on each other’s face.
Jane Richards
Published in after hours: a journal of Chicago writing and art, Winter, 2022
Mary Blinn Cento
Let’s go live a little. The body of grief lies still as death
itself. Empty hangers rock uselessly. A grainy, grey
photograph taken an eternity ago is all that remains. The
beat goes on. I loosen the ribbon to undo what separates me
from you. And the morning moon fades so fast, that blank
baby look, year after year, gathering ghosts. The earth has
wounds to heal beneath an undecided sky. I can see the
limits of vision from the inside. Light of brown October!
White wax drips from the ritual candle. The empty radiator
clanking reminds me of something broken; spray-painted.
Take me away somewhere. Scotland. Oh. We walk toward
the river’s edge. It’s hard. It is the season when rain falls
sideways.
Jenene Ravesloot
A cento derived from the words of Mary Blinn found in
when word and image run away
First published in After Hours in 2019
Wulf at the breakfast table
eating twelve poached quail eggs, topped with homemade hollandaise sauce and Ossetra caviar before a solitary stroll around the pond. Wulf in the afternoon swatting flies with his tail; walking backwards in the forest; dancing. Wulf at night mixing an aperitif with the name of Rimbaud’s Left Hand: absinthe, Benedictine liqueur, orange liqueur, freshly squeezed lemon juice, pineapple juice, one egg white, and a few drops of rosewater for good measure, followed by a dinner of crown roast pork and seasoned pork sausage stuffing. Wulf at bedtime: wine-colored silk pajamas, white Australian sheepskin throw tucked under his chin, Gaspard de la Nuit on the bedside table, the words “I see it now. My fate is to hang…” going through his head as he falls asleep. Then, those dreams of Little Red all night long.
Jenene Ravesloot
I got lost there
just like you. And now we’re both lost there and the good
news is we have each other and this vast whiteness except
for a few marks, marks we cannot read because we are too
close to it or too far, or too much to this side of it or that side
of up or down and there is no use reading the landscape for
meaning if you can’t make out what the landscape consists
of so we spend a great deal of time pressing our fingers
against our eyes as if to wipe the tiredness away but clarity
won’t come and there’s some small comfort in that, to be
surprised you know, to let whatever happens happen, and
good news, we’re still here and we are between this and that
and life is like that I being yours and you being mine
meandering in this place we’ve found ourselves in, throwing
the dice since perhaps the colors will be better found that
way, the cloth perhaps better woven that way, by god knows
what means, not by your means or my means, but divinely
made as such things are if they come at all and as I said, we
got lost there long ago. It was the throw of the dice, you
know. They said we could go anywhere. Just pick a place,
any place. That meant so much to me once, that is to say, a
long time ago.
Jenene Ravesloot
First published in After Hours Press, 2019
Imaginary Rooms
Notice how the light washes this building blond, how the brickwork neatly frames each closed window. The appointed rooms, elegant in their simplicity, seem emptied, except for these ghosts on weightless feet who hover above the blooms. Rare orchids, with purple thoughts, perfume in green pots while fronds feather no Mediterranean sky. A shade of blue splashes everything pale as pool tiles; a kind of violence lives here, a hush. Rooms float in brine like formaldehyde fetuses with one open eye. Mirrors flash. The owner is gone. The Siamese cat sharpens her claws.
Jenene Ravesloot
First Published in Sad Girl Review, 2018
Bio of Tom Roby IV
Tom Roby IV is President and critique leader of The Poets’ Club of Chicago. He has taught poetry at every educational level from high school to graduate school. His poems have appeared in journals, at libraries, and on public transportation. Tom Roby IV has published three books of poetry.
Posting Graveyards
Somewhere, sometime, someone delivers
a letter to a graveyard, pushes it through
a mailbox slot in the fence where it waits
until the breeze carries it to mausoleum,
to tomb, to graveside, to tomb, for the dead
to read to find out what’s in it for them.
No one knows why anyone writes such a letter,
puts it into an envelope addressed to whom
it may concern, and drops it off at the graveyard
gate at sundown. No one that is, except
the dead, who will be pleased at the concern
that someone still shows for them.
Everyone, except the dead, must think it
useless to write a letter to anyone who
no longer exists. Yet some things are so
important that they must be written down
even if they are never read because
if everyone were to see themselves
as dead—smaller and clearer as through
the opposite end of a telescope—then
we would all understand the importance
of writing and hand delivering our letters
to a graveyard gate and for patience
to await the favor of a reply.
Tom Roby IV
Sardines
Fresh sardines, heads, tails, and guts still intact.
Speared sardines stuck in the blond sand of La
Malagueta Beach. Salted sardines that roast on
skewers. Sardines crackling in sand-filled boats
that have been turned into barbeques. Sardines
piled on plates by the dozen, rubbed with more
oil and sea salt. We smell it, the scent of oil,
salt, smoke and sea as we hold each flaking
sardine by both ends, begin to eat the pungent
flesh. We discard heads, tails, viscera and bones
onto this imported sand from the Sahara desert,
then wipe our hands on our arms and legs before
we plunge into the Mediterranean while the sun
spins and glistens like a net of caught fish.
Jenene Ravesloot
Peacetime Casualty, 1940
My first father was all preparations
for the well-timed world war he failed to fight.
Why did he leave me no decorations?
He punched out his playmates, made reputations
with touchdown heroics, the cheerleaders’ knight,
joined after-school clubs for more preparations,
Boy Scouts and Sea Scouts, his justifications
for Midshipman, Ensign, a future so bright,
left me diplomas for wall decorations,
then made out quite well at cohabitations,
chance father by day, in the night sybarite,
his proud blues parading great preparations,
a drunken car wreck that stopped assignations,
his martinet father left on the drill site,
a closed coffin funeral, no decorations.
Death in the war would have left compensations
of medals, citations, a hero upright,
full realizations of armed preparations.
Why did he leave me no decorations?
Tom Roby IV