Jeanine Stevens

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Poems on Vacation

Jeanine Stevens

Poems that refuse to correspond, not even a penny postcard. On returning, they have a new complexion, new cologne, new ski togs, insist on a title change. The ones that demand the last say, have greater wisdom than the poet, tote that bale. Go slow, the poem wants more. Others haunt you and walk away, hunt you down in a shoe shop, so many soles need repair. Some hide between pages of a book, thumb their nose, advise, “Move on to new work!” The poem that insist on slumming: seedy clubs with hairy bouncers, neon Coors signs, rancid toilets, then offeran on-line ad for Speedy Alka-Seltzer. Most love the word, Elusive! Others hide in old files, hoping you won’t find them, do anymore damage, excise a line or mangle a thought. Fannie Howe writes, “I once knew a man who was a poem, like the man who disappeared suddenly.” Rushing home from errands, I hope to find inspiration; there the poem sits at an outside table at Carl’s Junior’s noshing on a Famous Star. Then, the poem as beast, always wants more words; you give it thirty or so, keeps one and spits out the rest, then jumps into the shredder. After a long dry period, feeling abandoned, you watch an action film, in the credits, a poem is featured as a stunt double. You decide to take up sailing. On your first day out from Sausalito, that darn poem waves from a fancy yacht then cuts right in front. Poems that mock, defy logic, want bluet instead of blue, nostril instead of Nostradamus. The one that says, “You have me backwards, the last stanza should be first.” Tit for Tat.

Then, you sit twenty minutes, meditate on cigarettes, salsa, and snakes—and, you have your Frida sonnet.

Jeanine Stevens is the author of Inheritor and Limberlost (Future Cycle Press), and Sailing on Milkweed (Cherry Grove Collections). She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt and The Ekphrasis Prize. Gertrude Sitting: Portraits of Women, won the 2020 Chapbook Prize from Heartland Review Press. Jeanine recently received her seventh Pushcart Nomination. She studied poetry at U.C. Davis and Community of Writers, Olympic Valley and is Faculty Emerita at American River College.