• Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER Online
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
    • Craft
      • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
Facebook Twitter Instagram
Facebook Twitter Instagram
MER – Mom Egg Review
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER Online
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
    • Craft
      • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
MER – Mom Egg Review
You are at:Home»MER VOX»Poetry»Jennifer Jean – Nature

Jennifer Jean – Nature

0
By Mom Egg Review on June 13, 2022 Poetry, summer/girl

Jennifer Jean

NATURE

Zuma Beach

We crowded the ice cream truck. Sweat & took a dip. Crowded the boom box. Messed with some words to Jackson’s Human Nature—why, why? (cuz they screw us that way!) We ran over there with a dog & his frisbee. SPFed each other’s napes. Watched this teen girl destroy five, prize-winning sandcastles. Kick spires & shell borders. Stab at sculpted faces. Fill moats with bits that people called meat. With crushed cans & straws & foil chip wrappers. We watched cops charge up. But: they didn’t cuff her—so, we turned to our beach ball, the riptide. Then my suit strap broke. Then I saw that girl

slump on a broken Zuma Beach bench. “You just walked out your car…!” they pointed, yelled. & she stared past those crowding authorities. Said the same thing I said after carving FUCK on the belly of a snowman painted on a Buccaneer Camp window. (I don’t remember thinking words when I did it. Not even FUCK. I just wrote. & a snowman in Los Angeles is ironic—but I was nine & wasn’t scheming. Wasn’t laughing. & when the camp director took me to his office for a “hot sauce punishment,” I said what the Pacific—or kids—say to explain stuff.) Which is: nothing at all while I cried.

 

 

 


Jennifer Jean’s collections include OBJECT LESSON and THE FOOL. She’s authored OBJECT LESSON: a GUIDE to WRITING POETRY. Her poems and co-translations appear in: Poetry, Waxwing, Rattle, The Common, and as an Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day”. She’s won fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Disquiet International Literary Program, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Jennifer’s an organizer for the Her Story Is collective and the program manager of 24PearlStreet, FAWC’s Online Writing Program.

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous ArticleQuinn Rennerfeldt – Goodwill In The Era of Girls
Next Article Elizabeth Fergason – Behindland/August

Comments are closed.

February 1, 2023

Poem of the Month – February 2023

January 14, 2023

Judgment

January 14, 2023

Blair Hurley – Breastfeeding and the Early Sacrifices of Motherhood

January 14, 2023

M.A.M.A. issue 54 – Mathilde Jansen and Lisa DeSiro

January 14, 2023

Maram Al-Masri – Poetry

January 14, 2023

Noreen Graf – After Your Mother Dies and What If I Don’t

January 14, 2023

Cristi Ackerman Wells- My Mother

January 14, 2023

Starr Davis – Strange Fruits

January 14, 2023

Elīna Eihmane – Night Mommy

January 14, 2023

Heather Lanier – Origin Story with Porcelain Duck

Copyright © 2022 MER and Mom Egg Review
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Submit
  • Contact

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.