3 poems
by J. Bailey Hutchinson
J. Bailey Hutchinson was born in and remains haunted by Memphis, Tennessee. A graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA Program, she is the winner of New South's 2018 Poetry Contest, and her work has appeared in BOAAT, Wyvern Lit, Beloit, Salamander, and more. She is currently a Bookseller & Events Coordinator for Milkweed Books, and she is an Associate Poetry Editor for BOAAT Magazine. Full publication and contact info is available at jbaileyhutchinson.com.
7 PM (Extended): Animal Crossing New Leaf
fat stratus / the smell of / charge oaring air / looking left, out of a window, sun-bath sleepy / precipice, the nearly of your knee and mine / destringing celery on the egg-blue porch / measuring the storm by lightning, its big-cat purr / we gather, accumulate, heap / heat-blister opened in sleep / the back of you, dusk-hill, firefly teemed and damp / ice settling, and settling, and settling in its vessel / dozy bee / how summer slys in, pouts the doorjamb / sweat-dims the panes / I’d sleep / with you / from orange-break to evening’s early fruit / plumskin / nectarine swelter / fence lizard nap-stuck to wood / porridge / sorghum / congo-pink which is / the bodiest / pink / how low-placed the ache is / warmth touring my each rib / in the bunchgrass, in the cartwheeling damselfly, noontime’s ointment / what makes the engine go? / desire, desire, desire / and sprawl / bedded in day and hot mulch / dream’s inbetween / routing me to a soupier you / all this, through glass keen as skins
J. Bailey Hutchinson Moves 658.8 Miles North and Tries to Make It Count
Here I go to hot-eye the road. To waller dirt like a sun-hungry centipede. Because. This warm licks different. What do I say about this town except it’s not mine, never made me, and that’s okay? To count the staples in a pole and not know them. To smell the river un-rouxed. Saturn, protein, the way my stepdad jaundiced in his recliner—who knows why I won’t sit still, but here I go to cow your arm, tongue wide as a shoebox. I don’t know who to be anymore, but I wonder the me that wine sicked every Ozark Tuesday, and Thursday, and Sunday, fourthplacing my mother who lives alone and is dying of it. Once, night-buttered, I rode my bike down a hill and begged that something might unexist me. Here I go to get grateful nothing did. The lakes, new and rootsunk, remind me what I haven’t held on to, and I want to ask, who told you? Who dumped all my no-goods—like you aren’t what moments every water? Despite, I call up my mother—we speak good. Bird-fluent. She is generous. The sun over the river is bladder colored. The sun in the low mountain blanched. Here, I watch the sun with a doglike almost, thinking: I am so nearly doomed, but there is a woman I might be.
Butterflies Are More Metal Than Moths
Editors' Note: this poem is best viewed on desktop.
“We here present the results of [male butterflies] only, because it was difficult to obtain enough number of females for the study.” Chen et al, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
a common bluebottle sees five times
the colors we manage
what I imagine here
cannot be imagined
which leads me to wonder
what’s a ruddy hunk of marigold to
a butterfly’s eye
citrus-fractal, gunk for bees, or
does the bud weird speech
like a mouth plumbed inside out
I guess what I’m asking is
can butterflies see ghosts and if so
how many have I watered in a jar
how many butterflies have laughed at me for
fingering a ghost’s nose or sometimes
gummily sucking a chicken bone in the yard
because I think no one sees me
elbows propped on a rotten patio-beam
save the moths licking lamplight
beige and cabbagey
lingering in the night’s hot-damp
I thought I matched a moth
because I can bonk at bright things
a real long time
then I read some moths are born
mouthless but this doesn’t work
for me starving and moon-beautiful
because I’ll drink any color
especially what’s invisible
when a swallowtail wants wet
it finds what it can
puddling mud rot occasionally
blood’s slick gel
red seeping blue seeping black