Jesse Minkert
TWO POEMS
Mesopotamian Ruins
Eras apply dust victorious
harden over masonry.
Accomplishments in architecture
and death; lives of sleep
and food and shit removal.
Dust sweeps off the table
water in a flask, a bag of emmer.
Thirsty soil drinks from the trenches
cut down from the rivers.
Orchards absorb more sun more wind
where the crust has awaited this
shovel and pick.
Wednesday Night in the Juke
The man in the pinstriped suit pumps
the bellows on his accordion, pumps
out the zydeco, stomps his foot
on a bandstand by himself. My round,
red, pinhole eyes follow the only dancer,
curly, polished-copper hair on forehead,
sheared up the back of her neck; crimson
Lucille-Ball lips parted and gasping. Her
canary shift flutters like a sail in a headwind,
her torso the mast, her arms the yards.
Her long legs sweep through the smoke-
stained air. Carmine-painted toenails peek
out from stilt-high-heeled sandals. A man
at a table forks his steaming Dover sole
with lemon zest and almond slivers. He
slices off a piece and offers it to me.
Jesse Minkert lives in Seattle. He has written plays for theater and radio, short stories, novels, and poems. Wood Works Press published a letterpress collection of his microstories, Shortness of Breath & Other Symptoms, in 2008. His work appears in Randomly Accessed Poetics, Subprimal Poetry Art, Limestone,Confrontation, Paper Nautilus, Mount Hope, Naugatuck River Review, Floating Bridge Review, Harpur Palate, and Raven Chronicles. In the summer Minkert works with visually impaired school kids to produce radio plays and PSAs dealing with their experience.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #4.
