Jessy Randall: New Poems

Art by Anna Magruder

Shanon Series

I. Shanon in the Intensive Care Unit

Shanon is hooked up to 
seventeen machines 

but the best machine,
for some procedures, 
is the nurse’s hand.

At one point the nurse presses
her fist into Shanon’s hip
for twenty minutes. 

As we sit together
in Shanon’s room, 
the nurse explains:
no technology
at the hospital
is as sensitive 
or responsive
as a human hand, 
any human hand.

II. Shanon in the Progressive Care Unit

I have run out of nervous chatter and
despite my best intentions I’ve never
been able to sustain quiet wisdom.

I keep thinking of Anya on Buffy 
saying she doesn’t understand.

My empathy abilities are broken 
and I can only think of my own
selfish suffering:

No one else but you would get
the Anya reference, Shanon. How am I
supposed to work through these feelings
without a Café Tray at Shuga’s and
you across the table?

III. Shanon at Home

She’s almost
completely
back to 
normal

except sometimes she loses
about thirty seconds of time

so the TV shows 
jump around

and conversation
is interesting.

In the Future We’ll Have Long Necks

In the future we’ll have long necks,
like giraffes—except what are
giraffes? We’ve never seen any.

Our necks will be so long. Our eyes
will be so big we’ll have to purchase
mascara by the pound. (We’ll still
wear mascara. All of us. Otherwise
we’ll get bullied.)

The future is just like now, except more.
More neck, more eyes, more hair,
more “beauty,” more loss.

Sometimes we’ll get so tired
we’ll wrap our necks around each other
and fall sleep, necks tangled,
inside our synthetic bed.

The Craters They Cause

What if meteors were
messages? Friendly messages

from planets who communicate
by rock. Like when

these planets love you they
throw rocks at you

and the rocks catch on fire and
that means they are

joking around. Like it’s
hilarious. They want to

meet us and maybe
marry us. Which to them

is a whole shower of meteors
and that’s fun! They don’t know –

They don’t know how that feels
to us. The craters they cause.

The Day It Rained Paper

“Something’s burning,” you said,
and we ran around the house
ejecting batteries from smoke detectors,
so many smoke detectors,

but we couldn’t find the fire.
Outside, bits of black paper
rained down from a point
in the sky like a high, black
balloon, maybe some kind of ship

or miracle with a hidden meaning.
Was this a new plague? If we
gathered up the fragments,
would we read a message there?

Before long, the paper rain
blocked the light from the windows. 
The room got darker and darker
until all I could see was your teeth.

A Mail Carrier May Carry His Own Mail

for Bill Stoesen

A mail carrier may carry his own mail.
He must not open his mail in the post office.
He must not dispose of his unwanted mail
in advance of delivering it
to his home.

A mail carrier may walk up to his own door,
carrying his own mail, and glance
at the return addresses and want
very much to open up one of the letters
or packages, but he must not.
He may then think about his letters and packages
for the whole rest of his route. But
he must not get distracted and
deliver mail to the wrong houses.

A mail carrier may notice parts of the names
of old friends or people in his family
on the letters and packages he delivers
to other houses.
He may see his sister’s first name on a package
and think of her. He may promise himself
he will call her when he gets home.
He may see his cousin’s unusual last name
on another package and want very much
to ask the recipient if there’s a connection.
But he must not ask this.

A mail carrier, when he finally gets home, and
opens his own mail, paper he held 
in his own hand two hours earlier, may
fall back into a chair and read the words
too quickly, or he may savor the words
at his kitchen table along with perhaps
a sandwich, or he may hold the envelope
to his face, drawing out the wait for
just one extra moment.

Jessy Randall has previously contributed poetry, fiction, and collaborations to Escape Into Life, so be sure to seek out her other work at this site, as well as elsewhere! Her poems, comics, and other things have appeared in McSweeney’s, Poetry, Scientific American, and Women’s Review of Books. Her latest collection is Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2022). A sequel, The Path of Most Resistance, will come out in 2025. She is a librarian at Colorado College and you can link to her website below. She wrote two of these poems based on images at the Wrecked archive. The image for “The Day it Rained Paper” is here, and the image for “In the Future We’ll Have Long Necks” is here.

Jessy Randall & Ken Kashian at EIL

Jessy Randall’s first appearance at EIL

Jessy Randall at Colorado College