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.