Two Poems

Jessica Farquhar

EEL’S NEST

In the close reading of my bathtub
I am a fish wife
 
yelling the names of fish I have to sell at market
and stinking
 
I come down from my eel’s nest when I hear
the song of
 
the bowhead whale       I sing
as I clean
 
I yell as I sell     One man’s vulgarity
is another
 
man’s lyric     I experiment with your feelings
and with his
 
I fantasize my way through chores
my arms
 
my lungs     are sore
 
 
 
 

VERTIGO MORNINGS

The porcupines are more curious than we are: one climbs a tree to get a better vantage; one marches toward us humans who are perched on our parked motorbike. It stops and turns to show off its prickly backside. I have never been here before. Nor have I worn 2,000 miles worth of helmet or lost a glove in line at a border crossing. I am afraid of looking like I am trying. In Kentucky, it will all be dizzy again. At the end. At the center of the dining table, a tiny vase of chartreuse zinnias. When the helmets and the gloves come off. In the middle of two lives, mine and my other one. My son and my other son, their presence and their absence.
 
 
 
 

Circa 1982, in a little Louisville neighborhood called Buechel, JESSICA FARQUHAR learned how to write her name at the counter of Fanelli’s, an ice cream parlor owned by her grandparents, which was regulared also by Muhammad Ali. You can find her work in issues of The Journal., Fogged Clarity, Interrupture, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and Bear Review. And if you open up the Poet’s Almanac app on a snowy day, you might be doled out one of her poems.