Poetry By Jessie Lynn McMains

Blue Ballads for (Un)Dead Girls

I.
How she haunts me. I could spit on my boot and slam a dance on rotten boatwood, and still I would see her, unluckier than a black catfish hanging over my head. I say shoo but she don’t spook easy. Ghost bitch, begone.

II.
See her sodden body there, singing from the reeds. She floats below the surface, her face an underwater moon, wobbling and blurred. Her flesh, pale as a fishbelly. The roots of rivertrees already twining bracelets around her skinny arms, claiming her as their own. She aches for it. See how swollen she is, how dripping wet.

III.
See her body there on the summer sidewalk. Next to the streaks of what seems to be gunpowder and blood. (Relax, it’s only melted cherry popsicles and firecrackers.) See her body there riding shotgun in the hot car. Her body on the bedroom floor. Her body in the bathtub. Her body blue and lovely beneath the ice of the pond. Her body, her body, her body. Has become a chalk outline of itself.

IV.
She’s a goner, a gone girl. She’s always gone too long but she don’t ever go all the way away and I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know--

V.
For whoever is forgotten there is a riverbank. For whoever is forgotten there is a sidewalk. For whoever is forgotten there is a bedroom. For whoever wants to drown there is a river. For however she wants to drown there is a river. River of flame, river of pain, river of madness. Bathtubs, swimming pools, pillbottles.

VI.
Like most girls I dreamed of drowning. Longed to be swallowed by something blue. So I swallowed pills, flooded my veins with drugs that swooned me under, my oblivion. Wrapped razorblade bangles ‘round my wrists. Swallowed pills and sat under the bridge by the river, boozebottle in hand. Once I saw a foot floating in the river; a foot and part of a leg bobbing in the shallows. Once I collected bones I found in the mudreeds along the riverbank, bones bleached and sanded by riverwater. Fishbones, gullbones, swanbones, girlbones. I made a harp of hipbones and hair and my sister, she sang to me.

VII.
Oh my sister. Like you I longed for the things that terrored me, the serpents that wriggled at the edges of my darkest dreams. In my summernight bedroom, swimming in the heat that flooded through the window, I imagined killers slitting through the screen into my sleep. Imagined knives that could slice out the bones of a fishgirl and desperate hands plunged into the wetness of my guts. Dreamt of soaking in my own blood.

VIII.
I used to give my boys knives and ask them to cut me. I placed their desperate hands around my throat and gasped toward the choke that would stop up my lungs as sure as water. Waited for that moment of too-far, when they’d have to take my body to the river, feed me to the oil-drenched fish. They never got near it. Too afraid of their fatal potential to dip a toe into that desire.

IX.
They say if a man kisses a rivermaid, a rusalka, he can never cross back to our world. A caul grows over his eyes, turns them to milky opals forever seeing everything from underwater. But what of us? Girls who love rivers too much, who bejewel ourselves in the flash of fish scales.

X.
What of us, girls? We who braid willowbranches and weep, who dye our hair muddy blue, who name almost-daughters Mississippi, Colorado, Shenandoah. We whose bodies are bait. Who wade knee-deep into the rivers of our immolation.

XI.
We pray to Elise, Our Lady of Windowsills, and Sylvia, Our Lady of Stoves. And yes, we pray to Anne, Our Lady of Garages. But most of all we pray to Virginia—Our Lady of the Rivers, Our Mother of the Stones.

XII.
I heard her moan, I heard her bones. Under the bridge I see her face, ghost-bright. Her pretty fingers nibbled by minnows. My heart becomes a choking stone, stopping my throat.

XIII.
She died of an overdose. Of desire. She Houdinied herself, stayed below too long. She swallowed the river whole. She started the car, turned on the stove. She baited the boys and made them killers. Made them kill her.

Did I say kill her? She’s alive. She’s just so good at ghosting. She’s such an ace at that old disappearing act, she even fools me sometimes.

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​The Teenage Witch’s Sonata

the teenage witch is in love with fire and smoke / writes the name of her crush
on a scrap of paper and sets it ablaze, molecules of ash balleting through the
close air of her room / the letters of his name curling into flames, licking
dangerous close to her fingertips / her crush has lovely lips and fingers but
he’s a mere mortal and she prefers the trickster gods who gave her fire, so /
she sends the name of her crush up in smoke, a small signal billowing toward
the stars / the teenage witch is in love with trickster gods and the rockers
and poets she’s canonized / a private pantheon of lonesome-eyed blonde boys,
jet-haired babes in leather, tattooed shirtless soul-growlers / puts their pictures
on her altar, adds adornment: silver glam glitter, dried red roses from a birthday
bouquet sent by a junior high sweetheart

the teenage witch puts holy candles among the sparkle-pop detritus of her 
bedroom shrine / white for protection and red for desire, scented ones stolen
from Target, and jinx removing, yes / jinx, the gods made her fiery strange; jinx,
you can’t talk until she burns your name / the teenage witch lights them, sparks
the joint her hippie friend rolled in exchange for a hand-poked peace-sign tattoo /
pulls the smoke into her most holy places, the back of her throat, the pockets of
her lungs / watches the candles melt, the flicker-dance of flames / soon the close 
air of her room is heady with the reek of patchouli and bergamot, wax and weed /
and she is leaping, she is twirling, she is dancing an ash ballet among the stars 

the teenage witch knows words are charms and music is voodoo / scribbles her
secrets in notebooks collaged with iconography of her saints / her guitar is both
broomstick and wand, it moans and screeches, under her hands electric, between
her legs a ride to punk rock queendom / at her piano she’s an ivory enchantress,
stroking ebony keys, unlocking sad minor sounds that reach up through the past,
tugging moonlight from today / the teenage witch is a weird bird whose closest
friends are tricksters and poets she’s never met / she climbs out through her
bedroom window onto the roof in the springtime dusk, surveys the landscape
of her sleeping kingdom

the teenage witch is no arsonist, she just wants to set everything on fire / takes
a sip of apple brandy, falls in love with its sugar burn / empties the guts of a
chamomile teabag into a square of notebook paper, rolls it and licks it closed,
sets it between her lips / a lighter flick and the world sparks and blurs, god-smoke
particles marry the fibers of her thrift store shirt, ash rains on the tarry roof / the
sky purples toward night / the teenage witch sits, a smoldering ember, a smoky
blur of long bird limbs and red gold locks of hair, remote and pretty / the
moonlight sears her holy / with its pale, ancient flame

Jessie Lynn McMains is a poet, writer, zine-maker, and small press owner. Her words have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Left of the Lake Magazine, L’Ephemere Review, Burning House Press, Shakespeare & Punk, and others. She collects souvenir pennies and stick & poke tattoos, and is perpetually nostalgic, melancholy, and restless. You can find her website at recklesschants.net.

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