Lady with Teeth

by Jessica Otto

Every Thursday night she has
nightmares where her teeth
break at the root
and fall out of her mouth.
She does not know if someone has hit her
or if she has drunkenly capsized.

Being drunk is like being asleep
but with more panic.
Sometimes she is with a man.
Sometimes she is with another woman
but more often than not she is
alone with her teeth.

Last Thursday her teeth exploded
from her mouth as rebels
fighting to throw off her
harsh, abasing tongue.

She gathered them up from her
sticky pool of tyrannical
blood —as always, when
she woke—and tried
to force them back
into her mouth.

Shoes on the side of the road

by Jessica Otto

we fall
on the red smear
of road work sign
where the edge
leaps out
claws the mountain
sharp flanks
caught
in the headlights

we have
no home

Memory of a Balcony (for Megan Taylor)

by Jessica Otto

Begin when you are scratched away.

Belonging once to the soft smell
of the wasp nest in your neighbor’s window,
you now belong to waking up
in a stillness that embraces you with
lesson arms a little like fear.

Say: This is a lovely morning
wherever you find yourself to exist.

To the killer hiding in the back seat of my car at 10 p.m.

by Jessica Otto

Hello.
Who’s back there?
Lovely night, isn’t it?
I was going to go home
but now
I want to treat myself
to an adventure;
something I can sink
my teeth into.
Get away from me! Stupid
driver! I hate it when people
get right up my ass
like that. I hate it
when people don’t get out
of the way for ambulances
and fire trucks;
Mr. Tough Guy
with a cigarette behind his ear
and an elbow sticking
out the window like the
biggest asshole in the world.
Wait till you start speeding 90,
100 miles in the wrong direction,
am I right? Splatter
brains all over the highway!
Seriously, you need to
speak up if you’re back there
because I hate it
when people call me crazy.

Coyote for SJ Tucker

by Jessica Otto

the words travel across the page in a folk song your voice bleeds sunset following the line down a drop of ink on your tongue a body stumbles against the rumble strip a casualty of wandering and diesel fumes skinned haunches and shattered nose point towards the ragweed the beginning of the line dresses itself in a drop of ink a hemorrhage here is the horizon bleeding down generations of sunrises and sunsets light comes up light goes down when you lick the paper the road allocates the flesh of the coyote absorbs blood bone and skin stretched to a fine film between the rumble strip and the verge the road stretches out sniffs with a dead thing’s nose gulps rainwater through broken teeth

brume

by Jessica Otto

     after a late-night thunderstorm
call it unseasonably
     the brittle image
slimy this heart
     of the moon hanging
in the water I don’t want
     in an empty skyto think about what is
     redly like a peeled egggrowing what is growing
     underneath: a latticing
slowly rises to the surface
     an encumbered horizon linequiet oil membrane
     tethered with silhouettes lazily churning in my footsteps
     of clinging poppy blossoms
     (clinging redly underneath the brittle image)

Eating an Orange

by Jessica Otto

I pick up the orange of the kitchen counter
and cut into it with a haphazard, serrated blade
crusted with peanut butter sleeping in the sink
next to a greasy tilapia spine that found
its final resting place in my coffee mug.

Inside the orange is something like the pulse that
floats beneath your heart murmur.  The juice
stings a paper cut when I try to dig out a seed that
is not the pearl I was expecting from this thing that
is not an oyster.  And eat it anyway.

Down the Dead River

by Jessica Otto

Her feet had been stolen,
her head separated
from at the neck and
her teeth fell out long ago.

He was someone no one
bothered to read about
but he got on
the boat
anyway,
shoulders bare
in sunlight.

The stone ferrymen speak
unpronounceable words
to hoist their cargo along
the shadowed Nile.

She sits on a wooden bench
drinking red tea, amethyst
scarabs clotting at her neck;
they equal fertility
and ageless transformation.
She views her afterlife
with shriveled eyes.

He dangles his feet,
like a child,
over the edge looking
for crocodiles.
Grey water swells
and reaches up,
sputtering for the last
imaginings of life,
the last tug
at an ankle.

Wormwood

by Jessica Otto

She has black dirt on her face.
The ruins of a garden plucked
for winter stain her hands.
She has scratched that greenery free
and bathed in the empty
soil, praying for next year’s harvest
with touches
of bare arms and thighs.

She rubs the flesh of the earth,
places stones in her mouth
careful of her teeth
though she knows
this is ritual.
Her tongue rolls in the grit,
Hips turn the ground like a spade.
She says, “I will starve myself for the gods
so I can grow poison in the spring.”

Necropolis Streetcar

by Jessica Otto

If she were alive
her name would be Aureate Lion,
Sun-Beast-Rampaging-
Down-Latitudinal-Lines.

On this Saint’s Day
she shines gold,
windows open and flaunting;
she scrawls escapist vulgarity

down the tomb cover tracks.
The masonry cracks against her
and a monument
in the shape of a griffin

topples,
wings broken.
Without hesitation she dives
into the tunnel, pounding

the bones of clergymen
as if she could cut away
the gangrene on the hind legs
of the city.

After the Flood

by Jessica Otto

i.

Perhaps this will be the storm that kills me.
Froth and flux
of river’s riptide
rise from your rocky banks
and flood this whole damn town.
The darkening sky
makes the trees smell much greener
before the glutting of the tide
and the tumble down.

ii.

While Noah’s sighs
polluted the ruddy beach littered with the bones
of heretics, their livestock
and other land predators the women did what had to be done.
While he thanked god
for the early warning, the strong timber and that he wasn’t
part of the slaughtered multitude
the women did what was expected. They walked around him
like he was just another
corpse, bobbed like spring flowers in a sunny afternoon,
rooted around piles
of driftwood and soggy cloth, picked out the useful things
and made camp.

iii.

I closed my eyes and
remembered an image of nature:
the rushing creek bloated

with a river’s flood water;
the one my car floated down
transfixed in a moment of joy

at the thought of becoming a boat.
I opened my eyes and the deluge,
in bouleversement, convulsed

over Tennessee like a vengeful
spirit, holding no redemption or promise
of a beatific purge.

The Patron Saint of Unaccountable Muses

by Jessica Otto

The lady is an iron vulture, a
drunken shadow teetering

on the edge of the shore line,
voted most likely to trip

over a horseshoe crab.
She was throttled and hung

from a phallic cactus when
the stock market crashed

for the second time.
No one stayed around for her

resurrection, no one
watched her catch a crow in mid

take off, stick two fingers down
its throat and pop her eyeball

out of its broken beak.
She kept the noose for its neo-hippie look

and moved into an alley off of
Capitol Street. Last I saw of her

she was feeding the stray cats
slightly green slices off her right

arm and passing out cigarettes
to the working girls.