Jacey Blue Renner is currently studying poetry in the Lesley University MFA program. She has been published in the anthology Looking Back to Place and was a recipient of The Harwood Emerging Artist Fund's Marion & Kathryn Crissey Award. Jacey is stationed in South Georgia with her husband James, an Air Force Captain. She is hard at work on her first chapbook.
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14th and Muse
Night Owl BBQ splashed neon
across cardboard, smell soaked
with urine and us
walking toward another late night
haunt, me working to shed
my late night haunts.
My melancholy raced to Ireland
returned with dirty shamrocks
that I rubbed on my fingernails
trying to get the smell of hurtwash off.
It preyed. I prayed.
Melancholy burnt one hole,
then another, on the left side
of my belly button.
We were up to our knees
in flooded neon.
I lifted the bucket
from my head, showing
the streets my tears,
the tattoo of Union Square’s north corner
under my eyebrow.
Left handed, I wrote to you tonight.
Wrote to tell you, you were right—
we can’t live like penned up wolves,
we can’t drive farm trucks forever.
I picked the melancholy
from between my toes,
flicked it like burnt ash
into the sewer.
I remembered. In another life I was a harp.