Poetry by Emma Janssen

Nicholas_T CC


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Greek Class Mourning Poem

In which Antigone returns
to Western Mass / Polynices
returns to Western Mass and
I am there too / where
Polynices taught Antigone
how to drag the smoke out
of a cigarette and later
/ years later / taught her that she was blackening
her lungs / he would
know, wouldn’t he? And he quit / for a time /
but she never quite could,
Antigone is stubborn / that blood /
is stubborn / in class they call it fate /
or curse / but I always called it
addiction / regardless
/ they’re all passed down /
through our bodies / our bodies / just vessels /
for the generations to pass through

In which Polynice’s body
was left out / for days and /
the Michigan cold picked
like ravens / at his eyes
un / wept / un / returned

In which Antigone took a red eye
back to Thebes which still hung
with Jocasta’s wintered silence /
all these years later it stays
in the blood / in the highways

In which Antigone and I
slice apples / 
and when she buries him /
she mourns in the Greek way /
tearing at the hair,
my mother’s soft hair, covering
the face in dust,
her face / which I see rising
up through mine these days

In which Antigone survives it,
and I do too,
and she takes me away from
the Dirce’s springs /
the Theban groves /
the smoke /
thronged hills.





The Black Lake

When I was fifteen I decided that I was finally done carving myself into the world. I decided that I had become myself. That I belonged to my body and my body belonged to me and everything was this single selfness. When I was fifteen my body and I took a red-eye across the country. My mother was there too. We took a red-eye across the country and I woke up in the carcass of autumn. I was fifteen and the world was rotting leaves and birch trees that arched like ribs and an icy black lake like a pupil that had burst and swallowed the iris of an eye. The world was rotting and we had come to bury my mother’s brother. I was fifteen and I had just finished carving myself into the world. I was fifteen and I knew the boundaries of my selfness. Ice traced along the boundaries of the black lake and melted under a sticky white sun. My mother drove me along roads that you can’t ink into paper. She unfurled them. I was fifteen and she was forty-nine, or maybe fifteen, or maybe six. The boundaries of her selfness twitched and tangled there, like someone had snapped a taut wire and it had coiled in and in and in on itself. Autumn was rotting but frost came and tried to stitch it together — mud hardened at the graveyard, ice traced along the boundaries of the black lake. We buried my uncle with his mother. I was fifteen. My mother’s hands shook. Next to my mother, I shook. I was fifteen and time was no longer a thing bound and stitched. Time was the lake’s burst pupil, and time was my mother unfurling backroads along her arms. I was fifteen and I was finally done carving myself into the world. In the graveyard, snow flurried around my head. Or maybe it didn’t. But I see it that way, now. When I was fifteen, time was rotting among the birches ringing the black lake. When I was fifteen, I walked away from my body and became my mother, my grandmother, my aunt. When I was fifteen, we buried my uncle with his mother and I tucked my selfness beside them in the frost dirt. When I was fifteen, I belonged to my body and my body belonged to the black lake and my selfness was eaten by winter.

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Emma Janssen is a 21 year-old queer poet from the Bay Area who reads books and does math at the University of Chicago. Outside of school and writing, she can be found swimming in cold water, doing environmental journalism, and chasing after street cats.