“Spanish Donkey / Pear of Anguish” is Jessie Janeshek at her flappiest– deliciously dark, sardonically surreal, twistedly sensual– and it’s merely one of four poems she contributed to our Summer 2015 issue, currently orderable online via Amazon and Createspace, or purchasable at independent brick-and-mortar stores like Bluestockings and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

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TEENY HUMILITY COMETH TO ROOST
and try on a red pleather miniskirt.
      Nothing elaborate in our small universe
                we don’t expect to feel better
        but we have a web presence
                and our hands smell like new pubes
                and yeast after sleep.

Witness humanity
   fixing our uterus
   our lagging muffler
                                when we give the dolls hooves
                                and make them little sweetmeats.
                                We lap the raccoon blood

when we break from the we voice
    our blue glands kitschy
our kidneys managed.

                            The purple star horse’s
                               charming joints creak.
                            He unfolds over us
                               cock unwieldy, piss-poor.

Then science gets interesting
    séances in jars.
We’re mad. I mean crazy
    though angry applies

                                our sex a systematic
                                   contagious compromise.
                                I rub your face off of
                                   the triple-braid bride’s.
                                I think I hear you coming
                                   but it’s just the sheepdog.

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JESSIE JANESHEK‘s first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008).