EMILY JENNINGS - POEMS

Emily Jennings is a writer and wife from Berea, Kentucky. She increasingly finds herself looking wide-eyed at the world and has a passion for paying attention

Synthetic Consumed

The room looks sterile despite the rotted
smell. There’s something sickly underneath the
bleach that’s been poured on the floor of scattered
green and blue tile. A bloody nose of a 
floating head. “My insides are falling out!”
of a prolapsed rectum. Everyone smokes.
A curtainless window and a sheetless
bed. Dark voices whispering to synthetic
consumed brains a murderous refrain. A song
that doesn’t end save the end of a rope.
A woman hides in the floorboard of her car,
away from it.
 ​

It Rises

Dance to sculpt the air, from can’t see
morning to can’t see night. Swing hair
back and forth until it’s greasy
with sweat, whipping bare the sounds of
denial. Rhythmic blood flows on
down the river, doesn’t fight the
banks. Beats seeping down into soil.
The ground isn’t level, quaking. 
It rises, the swollen earth up
to dance free with the atmosphere.
It rises, the red river blood
pulsing in hearts of ash, wet coal.
 ​

Vulcan

He plays with his hair on fire;
the rainmaker, the man of the 
hour. A fiery ocean
wave rolling through space, consuming
oil varnished tides. He collapses
in tree tops and starts a forest 
blaze. His fly trap catches Venus
in its clutches, tenderly at
first before digesting the whole
of her until they are one flesh.
He stokes the coals as he tends fields,
leaving dollops of fire in
his footsteps. Venus follows to
stomp them out before they spread far.
Their volcanic staircase spirals
to the heavens. Metal and ore
for weaponry, works in progress
gleam in his quirky face, smiling.
 ​

A Veil

slightly frosted sky, as a cake,
with see through veil, a wedding day
in the heavens
a dream-like love, a connection
so deep, layers never to peel,
lost on open
eyes and waking, sunlight quivers
and reflects off leaves in trees to
make me nauseous
beauty too much for my inward
man to digest, a sky too bright
for my dry hands
but watching still for signs of him
hiding in the clouds, from my dreams
that are not real