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JESSIE JANESHEK
​

Picture
Image by Leah Sophia Dworkin

​Design for Living/Vanitas
There’s a certain kind of humming I cannot understand.
I can’t stand your lives                         I can’t clear my head
            I don’t know what                               could hold me together
tubercular beauty                                 a black dahlia mugshot
            soggy theosophy                                  intense masturbation
to stay in bed watching gangster movies
            despite or in spite of    the lengthening days?
 
I try to read waves                   draw the girl as a baby
            swimming inside me    edging myself         an unfortunate caricature
            in this art deco bedroom                static on the pink phone
and this is plot progress           a husband or killer
            hidden in the French elevator        or where do we go
blow the rabbits’ nest up          walk alone with the blade?
 
Or I grew up with bad hair      and small dinners convincing
            everyone I was dim                  an invalid who communed
with the fairies, their lengthy, leathery wings
because if it’s a photograph      it has to be real
                        and then we upgraded              to an iron lung with mirror
                        a view of the treehouse
                        no ribs sticking out here
and we met in a forest fire       (I’d crawled out of the lung)
            and you said to leave the rabbits alone
they’ll grow up quick               in a couple of weeks we’ll be crying
                        nest full of blood
 
and theosophy was a side piece            like a cake we didn’t need
            filtered through the tree and the prophecy
the difference being at least I tried to get it
                                    and on the path to enlightenment
                        the wind caught my crinoline
                                    threw me into the sea
                                    or on a humid night in Mississippi
                                    Jayne Mansfield’s head popped off
                        or that was also a fiction
                                    or—I’ll forgive you your trespasses--
                        another stab at religion.
 
 
Note: Design for Living is the title of a 1933 film.
Red Dust Gunshot
​The smell is half sex
            waiting in Soccoro                   with my wet thighs
                        and my powdery hair
and a ceramic cactus                on the roadside
            heavy lids/heavy limits
 
or you write to find yourself
            on the road to California
bald limbs/bad lids
            pretend you’re Vantine            too dumbstruck to clean
                        peering around the corner.
 
Curls barely move                    above the monsoon
            the saint’s candle makes me envy
            it doesn’t not motivate
the calendar girl                       doesn’t save me a pain.
 
 
The smell is half fish                a ridiculous epic
            kidney-shaped failings             behind pink damask drapes.
I don’t know about anything
            when you run out of money     to keep freezing your capsule
when you masturbate so much             you run out of wrist.
 
                        Vantine started scraping the cage
            the hot smell of piss                             a soft font
                        a dive bomb                 not even a bridesmaid.
It’s all peace and capsule                watching her rump
            bones so boozy you smash up again.
They made us a jungle             in the backlot, Culver City.
           
Everything after her death was our afterlife.
            The Hollywood sign shone like ice.

 
 
Note: Red Dust is the title of a 1932 film starring Jean Harlow as Vantine.
Star '80 Planchette
Exeunt mortality          personality       sentimentality
the little girl left           behind in her coffin
            no color left in her hair            candy floss
and the sheer               fact she was desultory
            posing naked while everyone moved.
 
Justice judging with difference, the draw
            or justice judging at Palm Springs atomic
with aqua blue radios               shining in eye walls
            or justice judging by freezing her body.
 
The unicorn is in memorium    the smell of a gunshot
            memorizing a horoscope
to be astral in hell.
 
You can live down a scandal if you want to
            you can work in a slaughterhouse
come out in a pink skirt and rollerskates
            sadness in your gut      Harlow’s death like a gat
the set became quiet.
 
I don’t want to foster your mourning
            horizon and the pressure         of bathing in a rain barrel
or a coffin        or a rotten        Venice Beach gondola.
 
            You beg me to come fix           your degenerate landscape
                        but you’d better eat the fish     while it still has a fever
            you’d better swallow    a lock of my hair
                        you’d better get your nose        butchered to look like me
            outside melodrama
and burning inside       the genie-shaped bottle
                                    the muscle contractions
                        we used to call sex
                                    next to the bondage machine.

 
 
 
Note: Star ’80 is the title of a 1983 film about the life and death of Dorothy Stratten.
Monroe Planchette
Look in the coffin window
            so much glam              so much sadness
see the little girl’s face              (thick cheeks)
            perfectly preserved                  and I just need a way
to disappear into Venice
            let go the stripes of time, a tight blue skirt, my mother
                        a lacy paper gondola.
 
            I could haunt Hotel Ocean.
They gave her a fake name       because no other bodies
left behind looked the same.
           
            The first It Girl felt the mercury
            shimmer on her tonsils
    the little girls’ dead cheek like a cloud
like how do you handle
    the loss of red lipstick and       brains
black cat lanterns         an airplane body
    and how do you handle       starting out late
a Harlow sans the wink      story so heavy
            the script rewriting each night
a red-heart altar to Harlean
            and men don’t make passes at addicts
           
                        and I spend money on Pucci
                        don’t ask for forgiveness
            wiping my lips
                        but I know the perfect way
            to highlight my own face.
Did She Go to Hell?                               Yes, and They Called It Hollywood
It’s love I’m after                                   or monkey business
                        or this river on the floodplain
            but I think I’ve found my ghost.
                        She’s getting drunk on this last day
            she says I smoke too much
                        she says I am bankable               I better behave
        but am I tough enough?
                        She’s the last of the It girls
            and she is small enough        to slide through
                                          the rails of her sickbed.
                        This town, houses hollow
                                    too close together
                        pink triptychs                pink tricycles parking outside
                                    and on the sidewalks rusted hairpins
                        my blood-stained Draculette cape.
 
I killed Rita Hayworth                            she felt too frothy.
                        Was it Carole Lombard
                  or Constance Bennett
                        in the scene of the scarred factory mirror?
            It’s too hot in here         for the longlegged deer
                        but I asked her how
            I sucked down all the vodka.
                  I did not light a candle
                        but I did ask her how
                                    I sucked down that Halloween sunset
                  before the ghost I found
                        turned into a bat.
            Suddenly I’m vomiting
                        all over the cornfields
            suddenly I’m shedding
                                    all my extra weight in your cornfield
            but aren’t we all equally talented?
 
Suddenly I’m pissing                              in my white jewel-toned nightie
                        behind all spooky pines
            missing when late-night TV
                        was like another universe
            color-changing arsenic                shrinking my waist
madcap and darkness
                                                            the blue-black route a dead rooster
                                                you flip me over
                                    and fuck me      how we hide from police--
 

 
 
Note: The title is a photo caption from the book Movie Star by Ethan Mordden.

JESSIE JANESHEK's second full-length book of poetry is The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017). Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming). Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. Read more at jessiejaneshek.net.
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