Lisa Jarnot

Lisa Jarnot was born in 1967 in Buffalo, New York, and attended SUNY-Buffalo and Brown University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. Her work has appeared in Bombay Gin, The Chicago Review, Five Fingers Review, Grand Street, and elsewhere. Formerly the Editor of No Trees, Troubled Surfer, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jarnot has taught at Naropa University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Long Island University, Brooklyn College, and elsewhere. She is the author of Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland, 2001), and Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), and a coeditor of An Anthology of New (American) Poetry (Talisman, 1998). Jarnot now lives in New York City and is completing a biography of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan.

Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima

And how terrific it is to write a radio poem

and how terrific it is to stand on the roof and

watch the stars go by and how terrific it is to be

misled inside a hallway, and how terrific it is

to be the hallway as it stands inside the house,

and how terrific it is, shaped like a telephone,

to be filled with scotch and stand out in the street,

and how terrific it is to see the stars inside the radios

and cows, and how terrific the cows are, crossing

at night, in their unjaundiced way and moving

through the moonlight, and how terrific the night is,

purveyor of the bells and distant planets, and how

terrific it is to write this poem as I sleep, to sleep

in distant planets in my mind and cross at night the

cows in hallways riding stars to radios at night, and

how terrific night you are, across the bridges, into

tunnels, into bars, and how terrific it is that you are

this too, the fields of planetary pull, terrific, living

on the Hudson, inside the months of spring, an

underwater crossing for the cows in dreams, terrific,

like the radios, the songs, the poem and the stars.

The New Life

I eat steak and live on the big neon avenue and fear strangers,

admire my neighbors, the drug store, and the bus,

I as an addict live addicted to the avenue, in the dark folds

late at night, addicted to sleep and lavender,

I went into the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine,

loving you and the liquor store, the lavender bottles, the

many directions in which the hairs on my lover’s head

fall at twilight reading Roland Barthes,

I went into the sidewalk to reconstruct the broken glass,

loving sleeping I went into dark folds late at night loving my lover

but also addicted to fearing and loving my neighbor and the

types of wine,

I crawled in through the window and loving my neighbor

I loved my lover and counted the hairs on his head,

I as an addict am an addict and the street below is below

and my lover has countless hairs on his head and the poise

of living on the big neon avenue where I cut myself and

cooked the dark steak, emerging from the folds of lavender,

I cut myself and then my lover cut himself, and someone

puked on the side of a van

I fear the fears my lover fears and fearing strangers fear

the steak and twilight reading Barthes

I love him steadily reading fears and quiet the twilight reading

and quiet my lover and quiet my fears, admiring lovers and fearing

handsome strangers in the drug stores near the puked on van,

I run toward him in a bus in a dream, my lover puked on by the

children on the bus,

Coveting the drug store hip-hop lavender flowers, never quite

understanding what’s been said, I admire cutting my steak,

the street below is filled with all the neighbors’ heads and lovers

close behind the window weightless eating steak

I read the newspapers about the avenues and my lavender

photographed next to the wine,

I think my lover will be photographed and I am concerned about

the avenue itself, assuming neon characteristics, sometimes

casting shade,

I shade my eyes from the avenue where my lover and I make

love and the neighbors love their neighbors and the neon

characteristics of nightclubs shade the photo’s eye, expecting

too much of the avenue like an unfinished painting

contrasting churches and contrasting love

I walk backward toward the street and love to be so backward

and love the lover’s neighbor and casting shadows backward cast

the wine and types of love,

I close slowly avenues of poise assuming love and folds of

lover’s hair,

I close slowly the sidewalk to find the broken glass, going toward

my lover to find the folds of likeness in the mirror made of glass and

waiting slowly close,

And loving how we meant to be sleeping I love the avenue

where we sleep and love the neighbors, vigilant, never quite asleep,

near the sides of vans,

I, slowly, closed with lavender, wake the lover waiting on the

avenue of glass.

Song of the Chinchilla

You chinchilla in the marketplace in france

you international chinchilla, chinchilla of the

plains and mountains all in fur you fur of the

chinchilla of the pont neuf, selling wrist

watches, on the oldest bridge of evolution that

you are, you, chinchilla, going roadside towards

the cars, the dark arabian chinchilla of the

neutral zone with pears, you still life of

chinchilla, abstractions of chinchilla, aperitif

chinchilla, lowing in the headlands in my mind,

dark, the cliffs of dover, dark chinchilla, tractor

of chinchilla, chili of chinchilla, chill of the

chinchilla, crosswalk of chinchilla of the dawn,

facilitator you, chinchilla, foodstuffs for the

food chain dressed in light.

The United States of America

I’m going to ask you to transition into a new theme

about the war. The thing that comes to mind now

is the war—the big war, the little war, the war that’s

in my head, the war all around the edges of my ears,

the war to kill the troops, the war to kill the cows,

the transitional war, the bloody war, the not-bloody

war, the semi-bloody war, the figure of the neighborhood

with war, running toward the herds of cattle in the war,

not good at war, awash in war, the war-to-mores,

the more and more to war.

The Girl Who Couldn’t Be Loved

“In every human breast there is a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancor and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent’s tooth, and waiting only for an opportunity of venting itself, and then, to storm and rage like a demon unchained.”

—Nietzsche

My name is Lisa Jarnot and I am a terrorist. I can tell you how it happened to me and how I think that it occurred, thinking of myself as a terrorist, wanting to murder and to bludgeon and to die, liking sharpness, surfaces of sharpness and of blood. I can tell you that maybe I was born this way and maybe I wasn’t, maybe of this terror I am possibly innately so endowed, and maybe there are other reasons too, in my training in the sciences of sadness which is where it all begins, and if you ask me I remember certain things, the gulf of red and white checked tiles upon the floor, the voices overhead, the stupid son of a bitch my father was, the freaking stupid cock sucker who was my mom, with the sounds in the air, of scissors, and canned food, and jars of instant coffee, as they struck against the wall, of the snowflakes flying against the porch light, and let me tell you what is good about me, which is that I was born in 1967 in a small town near a lake and I liked to watch the deer, and the horses, and I danced in puddles in the springtime showers after ice storms when the crispness of the trees was fairly new and I had these redeeming qualities, that I could read and write, that I learned how to cook very quickly, tomato soup, and cans of beans, potatoes sliced so thin like the layers of ice upon the lake when it broke up in the springtime and we hopped from flow to flow in thick boots and thick coats in the thickness of the wind, that I wanted to live on the frontier, that the shopping center hosted a Kmart and an ice cream store, in the fields beside the highway, desolate and gray, full of briars and the sharp-edged grass, dense with nothing, spotted with the rusted tin beer cans, and I stretched out in the back of the car, chained in the hold of a slave ship, on the way to the new world, with the spiny winter treetops against the metal colored sky and the road salt making noise against the tires of the car, at night when I sat alone in my log cabin in the woods with the wind howling across the snow across the roof, with the sound of the television in the other room, when the springtime came and I built my campsite out along the side of the same house, with lawn chairs and a blanket and some boxes to keep warm, foraging for roots, jumping from chair to chair in the dark red room and barefoot down the river on a raft, raised by wolves, like the wolf boy who I saw, hiding in the tree-light on my haunches with my matted gnarled blonde hair, not a vampire or murderer or thief, but just a simple wolf, unable to sleep at night because of the sound of the airplanes overhead and the raccoons in the garbage, and the creaking on the stairwell in the dark, and what is good about me are these things, that I exist in all the forms I am, purely good, like I was then and like I am now, tenacious, in the form that my tenacity tends to take, which can be hopeful and can sometimes be obsessed, trying to be separate, alone and wide awake, trying not to get hit by a car or a bus, trying to get drunk, trying to run down the street as fast as I can, with my bicycle, red, white, with a basket on the front, trying to get somewhere quickly, and going nowhere on the way, hiding in the shadows of the house and in the shadows of the corn rows in the field, almost within reach, flailing like an animal at the gaping mouths of doors, the door to the school, the door out of the house, the door to anyplace with other people, where I couldn’t go, sleeping all day, with my head down on the floor, deeply depressed, the twelve-year-old who wrecked the family known as Jarnot.