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        • Moira Walsh Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Staab Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Anne Swannell Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
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        • Jo Goren Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
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        • Stephanie Johnson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Charles J. March III Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Mosley Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Grace Desmarais Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Vieweg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Lawrence Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
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        • Andrea Rexilius Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
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​The Fissured Tongue Series 

Three Poems
  Jenny Grassl
​

twinned


slayer and slain     souls forest in all the dressed-to-kill          
 
hound-barking up the wrong frill     she     milk bog child      
 
he     her blood booted taker           rosewood violin song drains
 
sap into its tree       her father’s heartbeat       slow tow of an acre
 
for himself           he     knotted to a bough     slips taut      his dangle
 
circling her empty slipper shame     stag beetle       chews her name
 
deep      and young        into oak          limb from limb     her live
 
buried breath turns its afterleaf       gold      welded to his hunt     he  
 
double crossing     a river waging          above ground she may
 
have died differently     her soul still paired with him like the first
 
time     she was murdered       his table place setting      engine die  
 
and car door slam         smoke smell leather and sweat of wood          
 
his chair soaked with sins of the fathers            their axes

Picture
"Crouching Nude in Shoes and Black Stockings, Back View" by Egon Schiele, Watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper, 19" × 12", 1912. Open source from The Met.
in ekphrasis     I   
 
— After photographs by Francesca Woodman


who look the lens ago     through well worn thrall
 
with steamer trunk and fur      to destinations far
 
left my own meuse in silver      emulsion salt
 
she      a molt     afloat      changes back into me
 
God saved the empty skirt     the pouch of lint for wings
 
I take my hands from between my legs      though trained
 
by the smell of leather      I fly gloveless into stone
 
so porous      stardust cement     the give of graves
 
and world crack           body deep in the friable
 
palms sink into light-sensitive     turn into claws

translate us
 

I swallowed a language whole to meet your gaze
 
and spoke for days things old and navel to the tongue
 
your meadowy name           of mine      I traded American
 
swoon-whine          tipped tulip tree     on bedrock shale
 
we sat high on a pale limestone slope      fanned fires
 
in the gut with Alpine air     a glacier-cooled speech forged
 
to build and turn a Fachwerk phrase          toy towns
 
with Grimm     and sauerkraut steam     where I longed to find
 
words for things I could not say or mean     mountain river
 
without a continent     whitewater          talk      sticky      ich, du
 
sumptuous misunderstandings           we left the other side
 
of an echo          bell-wrung          to need      to woo
 
About the Author

Jenny Grassl was raised in Pennsylvania, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems appeared inThe Boston Review 2018 annual poetry contest, runner-up prize selected by Mary Jo Bang. In 2019, the anthology Humanagerie, Eibonvale Press, UK, Rhino Poetry, Phantom Drift, Radar Poetry, and The Massachusetts Review published her work. Other journals include Ocean State Review and Rogue Agent. Her poems are forthcoming in: Lily Poetry Review.

About the Work


"Murder, suicide, and love exceed the capacity of ordinary language. In these three poems I have tried to go beyond the narrative, into emotional textures of experience."
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