local_library Leaving Love For My Dreams

by Allison Jenks

Published in Issue No. 4 ~ July, 1996

Our ocean is flushed with
your face tantrums
Operatic Waves
Jet down my throat
I couldn’t be with you.

Timely I swam
into the moon’s inclination
with muted wisdom

Empires of darkened rooms
with low records on
my back.

Sun racked my skin into topaz
For a place
Fresh as an infants cry.

Merging purple colors of
fragrant apple lily’s elope.
Sagging pines drip
with forest snow-
Undoing this stained soul

Tombing a smile with
snowflakes on its tongue,
Perking these
Earth-drowned lashes.

I’d have swam through ice water.
To get the pageantry
of fame to
canvass my blacker wounds.

Bodiless, I flew to the drumbeats
Tucked under leafy roofs

Ivies grew over your face
In my back thoughts
But your fleshless smile
remained alert.

Dodging to my well-being
I’ve only been alive so far
Waiting
For these turnings.

I had to have this so
Don’t call my name
with the hailing sadness
of the Viola.

I can live this fine
As long as I have your smile
to clothe me when it
Simmers up this skeletoned arc.

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Allison Jenks' poems have appeared in : New Orleans Review, Art Times, Wisconsin Review, American Literary Review, and Midwest Poetry Review. She was a James A. Michener fellow, awarded by John Balaban, at the University of Miami's M.F.A. program, where she was Editor In Chief of Mangrove.