Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a queer Southern poet based in NYC. Read her work in Heavy Feather Review, Monstering, tenderness yea, and in the chapbooks The Rotting Kind (Ghost City Press) and Soft Switch (Damaged Goods Press).
2 poems by Jesse Rice-Evans
Sanctuary
after Grey’s Anatomy Season 6 Episode 23
Somewhere is safe
despite everything
you stay clean and yanked
taut, blood throbbing through
like it's nothing, like I
tripped over my best friend’s
body
It's a good day
when east is a jumble
of slender sanctuary
a chain unfastened
like a boa, live or feathered.
You dim hole you cheek
bones opalescent over concrete,
how full I am of fresh blood,
stability in its new form
Acne
There it was: the ability to say I was a thing and to be something different
entirely: To suspect myself of accruing personality disorders: one after
another, a tumbleweed of SSRIs, SNRIs, benzos, anti-convulsants, mood
stabilizers, magnesium, prescriptions, the skins I shed a skin, a sheet I let
myself fold, fist $20s and balm carmex, a hypothermic need from my
core, the cartilages lining my sternum like a lacefront, turning things
around for myself so buying strappy bras in plus sizes, believing that my
skin will never quit flaming, sharp beaks clambering just beneath follicle.
Scoop me or whatever, chatterbox questioning button-down linen over
tight jeans, linoleum plastic smell seeping between slowing down, waiting
til we’re ready. My tissue is softer than the spell I cast, the power of doing
my pastel nails, hoping to run into you, to wow, something gigantic