h o m e........

p a s t   i s s u e s....

s u b m i s s i o n s....

l i n k s

JESSIE GAYNOR

A TIME UNLIKE

Child like a child trying
not failing but falling not so
long a way to the spaces he made
along the hours, halve
the brick, inside the same. Child 

like a man trying not to try
but proceed, past the parcel
of a child, of an hour spent 
derelicting, scarcely beheld 
places he felled with abandon. 

Man is a space is half without
distance, assemblage of halflings
in a row. Like a fleetness 
of falling before seeking for
Child in a place where child wonts.

SUSPENSION

The body of a bridge collapses
on itself ; the girl 
with the ribcage disappearing
in St. Cloud. These girls take

for granted the arch loyalty
of bone. The girl with buckled
chest must need gently, if disappearance
is collapse with disappeared occasion. When

bridge, when body. When marrowless wants
what surety. That girl wants reason
for collapse, but reason’s build wastes,
build wastes from body.

The girl and bridge found
a riverbed together and disappeared there,
where each takes good mend
to the other’s spine.

YOUR NEW GIRLFRIEND IS A COW

I cashed in all my chips and turned 

your new girlfriend into a dun cow.

Now you love her even more, your sweet 

cow-girl. You walk her through town each dawn,

your pockets packed with clover. You take her

girlfriend’s four stomachs. Evenings you play her

Dixieland LPs and sway together in the parlor. 

The whole town is perplexed by the mechanics

of your fucking, but agrees your new girlfriend’s felted 

ears are comely when she flicks them fro, and her tongue

is a wide, wild nocturne. Among us, you and I 

and your new girlfriend have eight nipples, sweet, and piles of unfinished 

mending. Unstitched, one of us is kitchened and you asleep 

in a salted bed, forgetting we two made the blue one blue once. We 

pastured on want once and didn’t lick clean. I’ve traded 

magic for rope-lengths. I’ve traded nothing for less. 

I make mouths in mirrors, now. I’m practicing my lows.

FALL, THEN

Face like an obscure root, growing 
seldom. He pulps you, he pulps

you not at all. Spring you green
shoot you, he gathers you with laces

you with green. Did he say gleam? You heard
heed. Sometimes to understand 

is a wrench. You hear burrows, you hear Bulb.

	          Bulb yourself, I need you.

He trusts starches and births. You had a root

one season. You’re missing merely
the fact of it.

PACIFY

The moon’s fingernails 
fell out and down
and passed all the very dull 
birds and into their very own

downy tides, who assumed 
them with small froth.
The good minion, lunar 

mignonne, little
terror, all clear – 
mother mews at far-off 
tantrumming while the others 
beat their chests

to meringue at the licks 
of trum-trumming, soft
then rough and painful. 
And rougher 

birds come unjessed, 
and whose nest is yare and whose rubble,

whose nest that is, floating 
fingerly, nearly
cresting, alights 
in city, uncountried once more.







Jessie Gaynor is a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her other work can be 
found on the Paris Review Daily and at Spork Press online.