Jessy Randall
Your Glow-in-the-Dark Heart
I can see your glow-in-the-dark heart
from halfway across the room
and it isn’t even dark
Husband
You have disheveled
my sense of time. Now I’m
a puddle of goo, and you
are a hero sandwich. Or
we’re in college. It’s a collage
of love and craving. Let’s go back
to the movie theater where
we put up the arm rest.
Every time you scrape the ice
off the windshield, I’m yours.
Taxes
You showed me how
at the top of our taxes
there’s a bold black box for
DECEASED.
They don’t want you to miss it.
They don’t want you to accidentally claim
your spouse is still around.
How we laughed.
But someday one of us
(only one)
will check that box.
Voices from the Past
are everywhere. On the subway
one tells me to stand clear
of the closing doors. At home,
another tells me I have two
telephone messages waiting.
As with any voice from the past,
I can’t answer back. We’re ghosts.
Ten Thousand Books
These books are
holding up the house.
Or holding it down.
They have weight,
like all the degrees
of a family.
They are
wonderful
and horrible.
They are kept in a room
like hats and shoes.
They look
good on you –
they change you.
I guess it all depends
on whether you think
your brain keeps you
on the ground
or defies gravity.
A Russian Policeman Makes Me Think of You
When someone asks me what day it is
I think of you, and also a Russian policeman
makes me think of you, or the Russian
word for policeman, actually, which is
a word I only think of after I think
of you, so perhaps I should say that
you make me think of a Russian policeman,
or the word for it, anyway, with its letters
like connecting spikes and no way to tell
where one letter ends and another begins.
Jessy Randall’s collection of poems A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road Press, 2007) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her young adult novel The Wandora Unit (Ghost Road Press, 2011) is about love and friendship in the high school poetry crowd. She has a collection of collaborative poems with Daniel M. Shapiro, Interruptions, forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press in 2011, and a solo collection, Injecting Dreams into Cows, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2012. She is the Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College and lives in Colorado Springs with her family.
Jessy Randall’s Website
Jessy Randall’s The Wandora Unit and A Day in Boyland at Amazon
Wow you guys, I have felt something unifying was going on. I am so sorry, and I appreciate all of your kind words. I have been reading a lot, and get the gist of it. I have been selfish for way too long, neglecting my family and friends for a wasteful life. I am so glad that I found these poems, and I am so sorry that you all have the burden of my recovery. I know I can do this, thank you all. This is going to be a difficult task, but all of your poems and all of your lives are worth it to save my own.