Forms of Intercession 1. Today I am medium rare. Don't touch me. The yellow envelope brought bad news. Shall I mark it "Return to Sender" or shred it with my teeth? If you came with a dull knife, go home. I crave salt, rain, and the white taste of glue. 2. Across the street, a little girl rocks her doll on her knee. The pedophile who lives next door demands she remove the diaper and show him the little piss-hole drilled between its legs. He strokes the plastic opening until he can barely breathe. 3. Why is there never any lemonade in this house? The eternal optimist must be on strike. Maybe she moved on with her oil-slick jeans and knapsack of books. I once braided her hair and fell asleep in the crook of her arm. There are days I still miss her. 4. Rumor has it no one can kill a snake plant. Along the edges mine is turning brown. At night, I lie awake and contemplate the ways I might trim the leaves so no one can tell. 5. There is more hope in a cup of coffee than a stack of holy books, unless you count books of poems, paper chariots of the profane. Someone is shredding Billy Collins' poems. I forgot to ask why. I suspect one of his nine horses took to sailing around the room. 6. In my secret life, angels consort with horses. I've chosen to tell no one. 7. These days, I'm torn between picking scabs and charting my future in the stars. Every night I promise to sleep late the next morning, only to wake at first light, convinced the lines in my hands deepen while I dream. Soon my lifeline will reach bone. 8. At forty-three, I'm too old to wait on a redeemer. Sometimes you must intercede on your own behalf. I'm spreading tarot cards on the ground and tossing out the ones that land upside down. Jayne Pupek This poem is from my first collection, Forms of Intercession, Mayapple Press, 2008. The poem first appeared in Wicked Alice.   Notes to Jackson   When the pipes freeze, mice move inside with their hoarded acorns and male pattern baldness. Diluted light washes my walls in a gradual depression the color of army fatigues and splotched apples. It's habitual: I count what I lost, not what I gained. Relations are a coin toss. When I was a girl, only squirrels stockpiled nuts. Now, even the smallest rodents hold all they can. The blind girls from Staunton file recipe cards. There is nothing random in they way they complete a task. The pedals on my bike lock up in the cold. It's a constant dilemma to figure out what to fix to eat. I cling to the few reliable items in my life: Ramen noodles, work gloves, and this photograph: you and me at the beach, slow kissing, beneath a white umbrella of gulls. Jayne Pupek "Notes to Jackson" first appeared in billet-doux, dancing girl press, 2008 The Livelihood of Crows You ask me to explain the livelihood of crows. I say nothing, only point to the darkening expanse above where birds saw holes in shapes like themselves. We are all replicas, Jackson. In the field, a man spreads manure on the ground where white cabbages grow. I saw his face this morning, tilted toward the sun, and he looked as if he felt gratitude for his shovel of dung, his stretch of land. In the evening, when you go back to your sick wife, I won't quarrel. I'll stand at my stove and boil one of the cabbages down to soup. I'll look out my window and watch the red eyes of your taillights disappear down the road, while overhead, black crows divide the sky in half. I'll return to the stove, drop in chopped herbs, and onion. I'll put up my hair, wash my face, and go on. Years later, when I think of you lying beside me, I won't regret these things we've done. Jayne Pupek  "The Livelihood of Crows" first appeared in Stirring, 2008 Red Glove  A woman comes into the bookstore late for the reading. Already the poet stands at the podium, book open, his voice moving precipitously over the page as if it were bruised skin and each word printed there not a word at all, but a wound. The late arrival takes the seat next to me, no greeting or nod, she is already absorbing the poem, the longing inside her stronger than anything the poet might say. Her name may be Susan or Carol, or even Isabelle, but she is just as likely to answer to dirty floors, coupons, Clorox, aluminum foil. She wears her life in the strands of hair coming loose from the rubber band looped around it, and in the man's shirt drooping off her shoulders. I smell her history in the cigarette smoke lifting off her coat when she moves to hang the garment across the chair's curved back. Her needs show in her cheap shoes, discolored teeth, and dark half-moons deepening her eyes. And here I find the proof of her longing. It is in the single red glove clutched in her hand, and in the way she wrings it like a cloth soaked with blood. Jayne Pupek "Red Glove" first appeared in UK magazine, Mslexia Valley Notes  When you are old and live alone, dying alone is anticipated. The hand you grasp is your own, the odors the body gives off are ones you recognize, only sharper. Even rank. During moments like these, a house fills up with sounds, not of people, but of ghosts and sometimes, of machines. The black Singer downstairs whirs like a primitive insect trapped under glass or pin-stuck to cardboard before expiring. (These things thrill a boy.) Suddenly your skin is laced with stitches and regret, and while there are places you didn't cut, that doesn't matter much now. As a girl, your hand got wedged in the wringer and for a moment, it seemed the whole room might gnaw its way up your arm. Your mother said this should teach you a lesson, but you forgot what you learned because you didn't write it down. Sometimes you failed to pay attention, even when it mattered, especially then. Not far from where you lived, stood a house with peeling shutters. Late November, the year nearly gone, the occupant fell down the cellar stairs and broke her hip. On makeshift shelves, stewed tomatoes pulsed inside jars opaque with dust. Upstairs, acquired birds twittered inside their cages. After their keeper died, all the small birds perished. One large bird survived by eating the flesh from its own breastbone. Jayne Pupek "Valley Notes" first appeared in Ghoti Magazine Objet Trouvé 2007 1. Yellow paper blackened by flies. Vibrations indicate a breather. 2. I’m mesmerized by objects my neighbors throw away. My trash is predictable. Just once I’d love to discover something I didn’t intend to leave on the heap, something more intriguing than lemon peels, coffee grounds. 3. Where does one keep second thoughts? Misgivings? As a girl, I found a nest on the ground, and inside, three cracked eggs leaking gold. My mother’s insistent fingers tightened on my wrist: There are things we don’t touch because they are filthy. 4. In my hand, the flypaper hums, holding on. by Jayne Pupek  "Objet Trouvé" first appeared in qarrtsiluni