Jean Marie
I Want Bulbs
You are always overhead. Always overhead. I am looking for your services. I’m looking for an attorney. I need an electrician. My code name is Scooby Doo. My code name is Kermit. Psst: I'm here, under the limen. One phone call only. My ex, you see, he is stealing from me. He broke in, he had the code, not my name, but the combo for my gate and he took all my furniture, my beloved clawfoot tub, he came in and I have nothing; I need your oil change so I can float again. There was an injection, too. Inky, food for thought flew in–
It’s my neighbor. He sunk his syringes in the couch of my griefs. Just a catacombed fling. I need a lawyer, the daffodils are trying to divorce me, but: I want bulbs. You’re too soft for me. I want this depression, this big sea– look, I feel it, don't you? Feel that we are always overhead, but I want no head, that’s why I need a plumber. Let Zeus rain, go on: flood this skin. Deadhead me, cut the sea by its seams and slap it to the sky; pin it; excise this face, this whole sheen of life, lob it, leave a chair and a vas and the heirloom iron bed– an apocalypse sounds nice! – not the slow cooker again–please. I want it fast: I’ve earned that. My code name is Persephone. Clear the open space and replace it with something, a nothing that doesn’t suffocate. A dance, maybe.
Nevermind.
Do it already: guillotine me, golden rain me, snap my stem so I can rise, curl the light together in my fist; a bouquet, like I used to dream. Catch it. I am looking for you, your services. Rays and UV, a meet-cute asphyxiation. Then maybe I’ll tie shards to the clouds, burst like a cicada into life cycles, seventeen again
emerging
after all this time, I could rainbow the sky
here in storage, but God:
Don’t you know how to sing?
Fever Dream
What is a book, she asked? A fever dream, I said, but what is anything, what is a poem, a five-paragraph essay, what is prose, for godsakes, a sonnet, a song?
What is a stanza, a trochee, what is a noumenon? What is five, anyway, after it all, a kid on a playground, kindergarten, fuck critical thinking, what is anything, once thought critically, what is anything, criticized, what is anything, analyzed to dead, done and the book is alive– is it? Maybe stop being a bitch, is the thing, always the thing, right, stupid spoiled selfish bitch with books and pointe shoes, ain’t this satin doll blues, what is a word, letters, numeral, Roman characters, as if they’re the only, those sacred font-ed generals, oh– give me calligraphy and dances on pins, even some Comic Sans, for a laugh; so what is white space pinned by the throat to a page, what is color what is absinthe-driven insanity, what is everything and nothing ballooned at once, hot air at the ears, what is “at once” when you think about it, what is consonants and diction, the movement of tongue on the palate, the scrape of tectonic plates against the mouth’s thatched roof, the sea as it splits, the lap of waves, that froth of earth against your teeth. The dawn of agog. What is I’ll buy a vowel, all of them, to pull oxygen through gullets like oxen, traverse pocks grained by cleave and motion, a climbing wall of hand holds to the glottis, God; what is fubar, birthed up in this fiction —
What is a book? What is a pain in your neck, a tooth twirling from gums,
straining for loose, what is a loss you can’t hold, cue autophagy, a sore in your throat, choking you, ruthless; what is an asteroid, what is an apocalypse, at least in the suburbs or second grader’s gap-toothy smile, really, but blacked-out poetry? What is a fever but abnormal; what is normal, but a fever– that hiss of an immune system, normal disguised cagey in some textbook; what is the fever’s dream, redemptive; what is fever, but blood set to music, steamy, braided with iambs and gore and sweaty armpits, the exploded dream in shrapnel verse, to smite with high temps into abc’s and sentences; what is normal, but a farce. Absurd. What is something more real than what real is, what is real, but a pandemic pedicure, a function of collective Fahrenheit, jello-molded, an overplayed TikTok voiceover: all the pretty girls walk like this; what is narration and dialogue, what is category, please, don't start with first person, make it third, what is fiction, when you call second person POV demented? What is a book, come, tell me: what is anything, when alchemy, algorithm and alcohol all share the same mother, that grammatical confection, catalyst-ing reels that roll through your cerebellum, amygdalae gone wild! You’re sick. Looped into never-ending suggestions from DM’s and bots, bots, bots, who is to say the fungi haven’t already claimed us, beguiled hosts? Admit it. What is a book, but the antidote – to phone storage full: review your life in twenty-second video. What is fascia French pressed, ore separated from the hurt, hot stones melted like snow into sauce, what is anything, God, what rises from dynamite’s moan, love’s pilot light stuffed into vessels, overflow, fireflies caught in coffee cans, flickering–
what is loss, but the thing, really?
What is a book but drink me, slurp down this galaxy, what is a book but a daffodil’s reach, filament-y hands to the sky aboveground, screaming: pick me. The quick of Spring. What is a book what is anything what is a fever a dream a delusion; I mean, just publish me, daddy; what is anything when words can be contronyms; what is cockamamie then, enlighten me? Perhaps, well—what is per, what is haps? Oh it’s fate, really, so what is anything, then, what are you without category, without human, woman, wife, mother, stroller, she/her, pronoun heavy, judgment and genre-laden, alien, what if you come with nothing, not even snacks; what is a book but a shape for what’s been draped, ill-fitting, a paragraph for shit strokes on your palimpsest-y pot, an Elizabethan collar, a cadence, a boat of corsets and nomenclature to save yourself, all the sounds of the universe at once, OM;
what is a book, but a box of baby clothes in the garage that you cannot get rid of.
What is a book but afraid. The hark of angels. A cut, danced to death-spiral from a threadbare gum. What is a book but a transmutation, a gathering of lumen, before shards scatter into vapor and ocean, lightning strikes: baby teeth, constellations, mud, orgasms, nightmares, nail clippings, love, the final disco of existence: loss in boxes; they hang from gold around the neck, like fireflies aglow, threatened; it’s the child’s locket, cracked to the verse: Grass. Pitch. Dreams of Fahrenheit. Guts. Dirt. The science fiction of bug blinks in poked plastic, mom calling you home for dinner. A beckon. What is anything but a gift. What is a book; what, what, what.
Jean Marie is a recovered litigator turned writer and yoga teacher in Park City, Utah. She recently graduated with an MFA in fiction from Bennington. She won First Place for the Short Fiction category in the 2022 Utah Original Writing Competition, and her work has appeared in Bullshit Lit, Passages North and Five on the Fifth. She also stands up with one leg behind her head and talks to plants.
