Category Archives: Jendi’s Poems

Poem: “What You Need to Know Is”


The New England Trans United pride march will be held in Northampton this Saturday, Oct. 3, from 11 AM-5 PM. I would love to march again this year, but my husband and I will be in New York City on family business for most of October. Please send me your photos and videos to post on this blog.

In honor of Trans Pride, I’d like to share this poem from my new chapbook, Swallow, which is now available from Amsterdam Press:

What You Need to Know Is

Not in my urinal or my soprano,
white rubber corset or tobacco whiskers.
Not in the gun or the red bloom
on the tumbled gown. Not prone and not aiming.
I could presume to say that you dream
of Lazarus and if it is anywhere,
it is there, in the nights your dry tongue
burns for wasted water but more so
in the mirror dream where your hand spills it away.
Sometimes I, too, soften it like the twilight
and then I am that lightbulb questioner
who slaps you awake with a hose.
I in my nursing smock, I in my meat-stained apron,
how I wish I did not know this
much as you wish I were not beside you
(O my mustache, O my silver-tipped fingers)
sweating through the Gloria.

“Swallow” Poetry Chapbook by Jendi Reiter Now Available from Amsterdam Press


My poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize from Amsterdam Press and is now available for purchase online. Thanks are due to my awesome editor, Cindy Kelly; poet Ellen LaFleche, who helped me organize the collection and suggested the title; and my prison pen pal “Conway” who drew the amazing cover art.



“Jendi Reiter’s poems are arrows that plunge dead center into the hearts of feminism, religion, death, the interior of mental health and psychotherapy. Her humor and satire here are as sharply honed as are her indignation. All are delivered in highly imaginative and metaphoric imagery. This is an intelligent and powerful read that will leave issues bleeding in the minds of readers for a while before they heal.”
—Ellaraine Lockie, award-winning poet, nonfiction author, educator

“There’s plenty of poetry I wouldn’t give a fig for, but I’d give strawberries for the poems in Jendi Reiter’s SWALLOW. When I started in Poetry in 1962, I felt poems were only poems if the top of my head was taken off, to use Emily Dickinson’s words. Jendi Reiter, who is also a bold experimenter, writes that way—solid images, worthwhile themes, and sentences that stick in the mind like raisins in rice pudding. I find much of today’s poetry too arcane, which may be why it’s ignored by so many. That’s not true of Jendi Reiter’s work. It’s challenging, beautiful, and clear. Read it, and again in Dickinson’s words, taste a liquor never brewed.”
—William Childress, Pulitzer-nominated Korean War poet and journalist

Enjoy a sample poem from Swallow:

Wolf Whistles

We’re all trying not to think about sex or cake.
That bitter word hurled from a car.
A moment ago you felt pretty.
Trying not to hammer the nail
into anything but the board.
Hard hat men sucking on coffee,
women with their hands down their throats
like a magician pulling a ten-foot rope out of a bottle.
It seems to go on forever,
monotonous intestine.
We’re trying cold baths and grapefruits,
another route around the tar
someone’s grateful to be laying down.
Saying throw me in the briar patch,
come on, do.
What a great distraction brambles are.
Rubbing and rubbing the saw against the wood.
What wound is he favoring
as his whistle strips you like paint?
We’re smashing pies into our faces,
we’re cutting open our skins. The better to eat.

Against Sincerity


Journaling about some difficult family memories last year, I wrote, “I became a poet so that I could tell the truth without being understood.” I hadn’t ever realized this until I wrote it down; apparently, transparency is a privilege I don’t always grant to myself, let alone other people.

Although Eve Tushnet and I disagree on what the Bible requires of gay Christians, I love how she has retained the queer sensibility, with all its outsider wit and willingness to embrace psychological extremes. The hunger for normalcy, for invisibility after a lifetime of persecution, leads far more “ex-gays” to go along with the cultural assimilation program of conservative churches, giving up not only the genital expression of their sexuality but an entire way of seeing the world from a marginalized and ironic perspective. Maybe Eve resists this pressure because, well, Catholics just have more style than evangelicals.

Anyhow, this is not yet another GLBT rant but an excuse to quote Eve’s awesome lines from this August 3rd post critiquing the aesthetic of “sincerism”:  

It’s the privilege of those whose beliefs are basically mainstream to think that “realism” and sincerity are good ways of conveying the truth. Only those whose experiences and interpretations line up with mainstream culture can be guaranteed that their sincere heart-baring tales will be believed; and they’re the ones for whom this language of sincerity was made.

I could explain the relevance to my life but…that would be too sincere. Instead, here’s a poem from my chapbook Swallow, forthcoming this fall from Amsterdam Press.

How to Fail a Personality Test

That’s an ink blot. Too literal.

I know, it’s not actually an ink blot. There’s no ink
    on it, now, is there?

It’s a photograph of an ink blot. That’s what it
    signifies. What Derrida might have called the
    absent present. Or was it the poison Gift?

No, I’ve never been tempted to drink household
    cleansers.

You want me to say that one’s a bat, don’t you?
    I know, I saw it on Wikipedia.

But I think it’s a pelvis. That’s the tailbone. Oh, I’m
     sorry — looks like.

Because we don’t really have tails.

You’re the one showing me pictures of dead
    people. Ha ha.

All right, it’s a bat. Does that make me
    homosexual?

I just figured, with the velvet cape and all.

Everybody says that.

I could flip this one upside-down. Do you think
    it would enjoy that?

Oh come on, don’t tell me you’ve never apologized
    to a chair for walking into it.

Yes, it is all about me. That one’s a crab.

Why take longer to look for something that’s
    not there?

I could wait for the stain on the ceiling to spread a
    map over my day.

Did you know they sell a stencil to burn the Virgin
    Mary onto your toast? I mean, why this picture?

I could name the clouds until a white horse
    stopped for me.

But we all have a job to do.

A crab in a lace mantilla shaking a popsicle stick.
    But all you say is Hmm.

I think that’s very sad.

Poem: “Wedded”

This poem of mine was chosen by Chris Forhan as a runner-up for the 2008 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry from The Broome Review, and also appears in their Spring 2009 issue and on their website.

Wedded

Why can’t the dog and the cat get married,
the postman to the bishop, the nurse to the queen?
In the days when mud was chocolate
we could march the egg cups down the table,
humming that universal tune.
The teddy bear and the piggy bank,
the lightbulb and the tomato.
Not all of these relationships would work out,
as we knew from the sound
of cloth tearing in another room.
Still we imagined,
in those days when peppermint was money,
that a bit of lace thrown over
the cat’s spitting head would make her beautiful,
and a dropcloth would stop the parrot quarreling
with his mirror mate.
We were dizzy with weddings,
even when the books fell to the floor
inky and torn, face-down like bridesmaids
with their mascara running.
Why do the things that were sold together,
the obvious salt and pepper,
rows of rolled socks like dull neighbors,
always go missing?
So we married the glove to the mitten,
in those days when morning was bedtime,
when lunch was rice flung in the street
after the tin-can fugitives,
we matched the boot to the baby’s shoe
and no guests came.

Poem: “Zeal”


I want the truth or
quiet, you can’t have both
in daylight, in company,
from the baby-blanket sky we turn into rooms
you can’t have if you’re human meaning
no desire without its rind of talk, I want
that orange uncut
better than to sit here with knives
spinning the sun in a bowl,
I want the truth like a fat lady
wants cake, sticking her sweet fingers in her mouth
in fecal shame,
I want quiet like letting the beaver
alone who nibbles on the neighbor’s lettuces
because in her world she is right,
pines hushing in the dark and insects gold
dust in the last beams, how could any
great hand that shaped the clover
fall harder on us
poor toads, I want to turn it
all off, the lingual grid gone black
and only hands left, right
in the sag and salty hair of us,
dear fatigue, lift me at last    I want
to forgive whoever
asks me and maybe others.


    published in Fulcrum #6 (2008)

Poem: “Picnic”


My icebox lover, let us sit at opposite ends
of the blanket, pass a single egg back and forth,
the salt, the pepper, the tiny bites.
Let’s admire the suspended sunset of blueberries
in the jelly, decide not to open the jar.
The ants are making words on the checkerboard
of red cotton, like foreign newsprint shrilling its mysteries —
words of thunder, words of weather.
The future is obvious; let’s not puzzle
too long under its clouds.
Sharing this postcard sandwich, cucumbers and butter,
a hint suffices us for the whole.
The lemon slices smile sagely in the glass
and the bees waver between us, buzzing like knives,
ready to wound for their sugar.
We could fold our napkins, we could leave hungry,
not wait till the rain skins us in our clothes,
pushes us down in the soil like plants.
Lover, don’t grab for that last plate.
To be struck
once —
I’ve had enough lightning.

    This poem won a Commended award in the 2008 Cyclamens & Swords Poetry Contest. Read the winners here.

Poem: “Nature Morte, Palm Beach”


The orange inside the orange is gold:
in this juice the wealth of labor,
its sunshine the ring-decked gleam of the ladies
whose skin is tough and bronzed like the orange,
whose soft thoughts are hidden from their men.

The palm inside the palm burns like a cigarette,
the addict’s love that cannot breathe.
The ladies wave their resilient hands
with their burning wands, and along Cocoanut Row
the palms thrash in the hurricane.

The ocean inside the ocean is a spaniel
endlessly racing, drooling foam for joy.
Again, again, the senile sea
claps at each baby-blue crash.
The ladies own the view behind glass,
shutter the sun in pastel rooms
where the piano and the wheelchair sleep.

The album inside the album has no name
or too many. All the smiles and their objectives blurred
like a glitter of stars without constellation lines.
Look, these were your friends. Look, trophies,
grandchildren, the news. Whose is the charity
for this season?

The woman inside the woman lifts a match to her lips
that hold no cigarette. The burning stick
one more thing not to see, the flame familiar
as her late husband’s golden apologies.
Down her breast, a dribble of flame like fresh juice.
And still she stares at the expensive sea,
matches it breath for amnesiac breath.


This poem won a third prize in the 2008 Dancing Poetry Contest, and is included in my chapbook Hound of Heaven, forthcoming this fall from Southern Hum Press. (Their website is down again…arrgh.) “Nature morte” is the wonderfully evocative French name for a “still life”.

Recent Publications: “Leaving Olympus” and “Poem Written on a Dirty Stove”


My poem “Leaving Olympus” has just been published in the new issue of Conte: A Journal of Narrative Writing. This handsomely designed webzine also includes great work by David Wright, Eliza Kelley, John N. Miller and others I have yet to explore. “Leaving Olympus” is a poem about Julian, or possibly by him. He’s not telling.

In other news, my poem “Poem Written on a Dirty Stove” appears in the Summer 2008 issue of Heartlodge: Honoring the House of the Poet, a quarterly journal edited by award-winning writers Cheryl Loetscher, Leta Grace McDonald and Andrea L. Watson. As the issue is not available online, I’m reprinting the poem below.

Poem Written on a Dirty Stove

With the last cherries crushed on his tongue,
he says the pie reminds him
of autumn at Welch Lake, the eye-watering tang
of consummation in the air.
My spoon scrapes the dish like an oar
stuttering in unexpected sand. It’s slipped his memory
it wasn’t me he laid down in those reeds.

Later, the stars rise like a thousand cranes
and water babbles over soiled plates.
So much longer in the planning than the baking,
longer the baking than the savor.
The furniture we invited in
now rubs up against us, insistent as stray cats.
Only position differentiates the pinhole stars.

My eyes would hoard the spear of every darkening tree,
each faultline of needles in the snow,
green stitches the next day’s weather will unpick.
Vertigo to realize he is speaking,
a voice too familiar to notice,
like your own limb before it’s wounded.

Our bodies twined, like gorgeous bread egg-slick,
we feed and disappear. A case of manna.
Where are joys stored? I want only
to see what I see.
Darling, it was so good I never
need to do this again.
One star, one meal, one night – till dawn
dissolves the sky like lemon ice,
and kind amnesia brings our hunger back.

Poem: “Called Out”


The baker, said Luther, glorifies God in bread.
He was a fat fellow, knew good beer from a bad sermon.
Enough of these piglets in neckcloths
sweating through bare words never meant
to be dragged up from belly to lips.
Inside every man I want, I want
cries like a baby, but ashamed
of bread sopped in milk,
choleric to grab his father’s knife.
The helmsman glorifies God by seeing sharks.
The constipated scholar can afford to toss his ink
at demons in the frost,
his own chamber glass cracking.
But bluff sailors, their red hands freezing to the wheel,
need gloves, not Latin.
Bless the tanner and his scrawny boy
who sleeps in the horse-hay,
wakes to crack the trough’s icy skin
and offer the first bite
of an ordinary apple to the steaming mare.
Let him be too young to dream of whores
like Reason, Luther’s false bride.
She is all painted with vocations
of monk and knight and merchant,
pale halo, priapic spear,
the great ships laden with lemons.
The leper glorifies God by losing
his fingers. Luther counted beads
but could not count his dreams
where his shadow-self barreled through Cockaigne,
poor paradise without bakers
where sugar drops from trees and women
are all thighs and stopped mouths.
The beggar glorifies God by opening his hand
to the butcher and the nailsmith, the fool
by singing his cradle song over stones and pennies
flung round him like stars in the dirt.


This poem won third prize in the 2008 Utmost Christian Writers poetry contest.

Jendi Reiter’s Chapbook “Hound of Heaven” Forthcoming from Southern Hum Press


My poetry chapbook Hound of Heaven was a runner-up for the inaugural Women of Words Award from Southern Hum Press and will be published this fall. Thanks, Southern Hum! I’ll include a purchasing link on this site when the book is out. Below, a sample:

Hound of Heaven

            for Fran

It had been raining days when the voice
asked me to pull over by the river.
Not a voice to be heard but simply a must:
the arm moves with the thought, no word says Move.
The branches cocked like muskets, spearing the sky,
were soaked black, clouds wind-whipped dogs
cringing like cavemen placating
the weather of doom they thought was God.
Is that all I am, that bared animal neck?
I had let the pearls roll from my hands like water,
thinking anything precious could save itself.
I was silently wed to the clever,
dazzled by small explanations.
Still I turned the car, slowed, stood under the fall
of cold silver needles like a sick child praying
be good and it’ll soon be over.
There were the reed-clotted banks and the fists of trees
and in the river only a projected world
no gentler, no more likely to change.
Till a soft wind, someone, ruffled the waters
and the trees cracked apart, lovely as first tears after a death.

****

Dendrobatidae

Most deadly, most delicate, the jewel-toned frog
like a crown behind museum glass
tempts a perverse grab. Once name it rare,
monkey-mind will do anything for more.
The tiny scarlet body barely breathes,
on limbs like sapphire mined from colonies
to mount in a tourist-dazzling diadem.
Is power in the plough and jungles hacked
and spill of oil like pavement on the sea –
or clinging softly underneath a leaf
as our murky water, crowded air,
flows through the tree frog’s bright defensive skin?
Beauty-mad, how could we not lick and stroke
and die? Soft as a fruit and berry-red,
it tempts us to devour what we love,
to steal the crown of knowing everything.


        first published in The New Pantagruel (2005)