The following three poems were hand-picked by Samantha Gennett, showcasing the talent found in her recent chapbook, Pomegranate.
Incident
We sit together, you reclined and I upright, enveloped
by the nicotine you transmit. As you inhale, I stare at the orange
glow at your cigarette end. You look at me with a telescopic
grin, shaking your head, not even noticing the ash singeing
a hole through your Nirvana t-shirt, hair resembling elephant eyelashes,
lips shining pizza grease and I cannot think of a way to rewire
your melancholy or find a way to sew a mustache
onto your numb smile. This smoke, strangling our throats—is there a fire?
We sit together in this chain-smoked cloud, I underhand
toss you an aging baseball but your hand cannot render
the shape of catch, instead your body lays contorted like an ampersand
and all I can do is mumble “it’s okay, you’re okay” tenderly.
I have never seen anything less photogenic:
foam bubbles out of your mouth, white as pith of pomegranate.
Plucking the ripe ones
Thank you to Tony Hoagland for the first line
When I looked at my blood under a microscope,
all I saw was dissonance
between my brain and my mouth,
chapped lip smiles and a swollen tongue
whose only capability is to contort
pleasant mornings at the breakfast table—
it’s a delusion.
A supposedly evanescent war (according to my therapist),
with new a causality everyday
and today it was the man at the grocer,
who oozed like a pomegranate sliced by a butter knife
making me wish for sharper way to say “I’m leaving you”.
Elegy in Pink with Pill Case
after Aracelis Girmay’s “Elegy in Gold”
Dollhouse, pill case
fingernails, quilt,
watermelon or training bra,
thick-aired evenings in Alexis’
backyard, sangria evenings
on the freight train tracks,
we shuffle in the sewers
of a cokehead’s routine
tearing tornado from
our throats & nightstands.
Here is the model
of the pristine filth: Willow Springs,
you embalm the delirious
like a pharaoh.
Sam Gennett is a third-year English major with a concentration in Creative and Professional Writing at Lewis University. She currently serves as managing editor of Jet Fuel Review. While piecing together her first-ever chapbook, she realized that “pomegranate” was a recurring word in her poetry — she took this as a sign and used that as the title of her chapbook since coming up with a title was oddly the most cumbersome part of the process. As seen in “Pomegranate”, her writing tends to deal with some of the ugliest and downright human moments in life through bizarre fruit imagery and much inspiration from Sylvia Plath.
