Tonight's Poet Corner: Jenna

Jenna
by Belinda Roddie

She holds
toothpaste in a globule
like a globe. Like an melting star
painting her elbow with blue tattoos,
gluing the hairs down flat against her
sticky skin. She tries,

thinking, waiting, mute and somber,
to remove the heavy mass from her
fist clenched while the empty tube
sits and a spider slips
noisily into its sweaty nostril.

The reflection is not so subtle. The trick here is to
count each pore that oozes out a
threat on peach skin, fuzzy lips,
shrunken eyes. She cannot
brush her teeth like this. She cannot be
pretty like this. Not when the

drugs sit in stacks along the
machinery of tile lining
soldiers up and shaving them
in every private area until the
flesh is as fresh as a newborn.
Where Jenna can dream of crying
from the womb with a different canvas
with no salt and no fur and no
ammo and just eyelashes.