Poetry By Jesse Millner

Gerry Dincher CC

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​Maybe This Poem Is A Complete Lie and Everything In It Is The Result of an LSD Flashback to Saint Patrick’s Day, 1972, When I Did Acid For The First Time And Kissed A Woman From Lubbock Who May Have Told Me She Was A Cowgirl But I Was So Freaking High, She Could Have Said Just About Anything And I Would Have Believed Her, Which Is Why I Fell in Love With Her And Went Back To Her Dorm Room And Tried To Explain Why She Should Love Me, Too

Or maybe I’m on the Amtrack cruising past Marfa, Texas,
Or maybe I’m on the beach at Mojacar, Spain,
Admiring the 8th century Moorish watchtower
Or maybe I’m making love to my former wife
In that hotel in Skagway, AK, where the harbor
Looks like a cruise ship parking lot. Or maybe
She and I are riding Space Mountain at Disney or maybe
Drinking coffee in a Paris café or maybe swimming
Naked at Wreck’s Beach in Vancouver or hiking
Cape Breton and seeing a moose or maybe just
Having dinner on our lanai and whispering how
Lucky we are to have this life, or maybe I’m sitting

In a dirty kitchen watching roaches scrabble across
The tile floor, or maybe I’m drinking too much
Coffee on a morning so late in life, my bones
Creak as I cross my legs and the floaters in my eyes
Become water bugs darting across a creek in 1959.
Maybe I died four years ago and maybe these
Poems are ghosts and maybe my loneliness
Is as expansive as the black space between
Constellations. Or maybe I’m riding 

On that train I mentioned earlier, heading from Marfa 
To El Paso, reading poems about riding trains as I listen
To Woody Guthrie and watch light fill the mountain sky 
as I imagine Mexico to the south 
with its pyramids and hummingbird
Gods and brujas who might save me if I only
Let them in. But the darkness beyond is wide, 

the loneliness deep, and sorrow is a valley that stretches
From Marfa to a place in the desert where the bleached
Bones of a burro whiten daily in the sun.

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​Frenzy

This morning while waiting for my cardiologist I tried to lower my blood pressure by reading from a pocket version of Leaves of Grass. I let Whitman’s ghost whisper from my own mouth, I celebrate myself, but of course I don’t, given my troubled history with booze and drugs, so when the doctor came in my blood pressure was too high and he recommended more drugs and I heard my voice say, “No, enough,” and the doctor looked surprised as though he’d misheard me and I told him I wasn’t taking any more drugs, that I felt tired all the time already and took naps each afternoon when I dreamed of distant trains on prairies where the smoke from each locomotive never quite reached the sky and the whole world trembled from steel movement as well as the galloping horses of Sioux warriors who chased each train, sometimes catching up and watching the terrified white people spill out of the cars like shiny candy in their fancy clothes, becoming pin cushions for arrows, then bleeding into the green-blue grass, and I told the doctor I was tired of those dreams because Manifest Destiny was exhausting, given all those thousands of miles that were consumed by white soul eaters who poisoned everything they touched, even the air they breathed was heavy with imperial waste from foundries and factories and pig farms and slaughterhouses, and you, know, I told the doc, worst of all these weren’t my childhood dreams that summoned fields with the wild play that came from not-knowing the future and how every ailment, physical or mental, would be treated with drugs, either legally or not, all of us frantic for relief from pain  and anxiety, hungry for a measure of tranquility while toiling in the final hours of America with its relentless fossil-fueled capitalism breaking the spirits of millions of workers like green sea breaking into a shattered mirror of wave mirroring wave, and I told the doctor no more, please, I’d like to forget the screens that hold all my words and those of everyone else, an electronic Babel of babble. As for me, I’m with the leaves of grass, the leaves on the trees, the leaves in each good book that is not electronic. I’m with the migrants picking strawberries in California or cherry tomatoes in Florida. I’m with those who sweat and labor among the fields so that all of us might be fed.





The Humming Quiet

Of course, there are little gods 
in cereal boxes, lucky charms 
to ward off evil. There are 
Sunday prayers for the dead
in suburban churches rising 
like the garbled noise above
a football game, which confuses 
the birds and clutters the ionosphere 
with babble. Here is my prayer: End 
your fealty to the supernatural.  Take
a butter knife and spread stars 
across your morning bread.  Pet 
your dog.  Smile at the cashier
at the grocery store whose braided hair
amazes you.  Later, while you walk 
through the parking lot, notice 
there are trees on the little mulched islands,
crows whispering black music into the breeze
that scatters discarded plastic bags across
the asphalt, and there is a whole sky above you
wrinkled with clouds, making grey meaning
in the rain that beads on the windshields
of so many cars, you can’t count them all
without stopping for a long time and forgetting
about your life, the way every moment has added
up to this parking lot on a rainy morning in Florida,
this sacred place where the world has gathered
around you to show what’s truly holy
in the mundane ways the spirit manifests
itself amid signs for Dunkin’ Donuts, the Third
Bank, and Valvoline Oil.  This is your bible:
Words lit in neon, concrete offerings of
sweetness, wealth, and a smoothly functioning
engine to carry you across avenues
where more signs direct you toward
other places, and you start to believe by driving
far enough, you’ll out-distance the sorrow
that comes when the sum of everything 
seems like not enough, and the ordinary 
isn’t as filling as it used to be. This is your journey:
There are miles to be driven before you sleep, landscapes 
to be witnessed where the only
signs are egrets floating above cattle
in green pastures where the humming quiet
is more than you can bear.

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Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared most recently in Past Ten Magazine, Apple in the Dark, and Magazine1. His work was included in The Best American Poetry 2013 and Best Small Fictions 2020.  His latest poetry book, Memory’s Blue Sedan, was released in March 2020 by Hysterical Books. His newest chapbook, Gina, won the Editor’s Choice Award in the Anhinga Press’ 2025 Rick Campbell Poetry Chapbook Contest.