Edison Jennings , Poet

Edison Jennings lives in Abingdon, Virginia, and teaches at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. His poems have appeared in The Nebraska Review, Literal Latte, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Boulevard, River Styx, and other journals. He has recently completed a twenty-five page chapbook manuscript and is looking for a publisher. Interested parties may contact him at edisonjennings@hotmail.com

What She Left Was


fifty pairs of shoes—
all her clothes and rhinestones
parceled out to relatives
except the shoes arranged in rows
as if a Broadway chorus line
had vanished at the curtain call,
assumed as god’s own dancers,

leaving just these vestiges,
fifty pairs, no hiking boots or high-tops,
but every pair impractical,
and all too small.

That was her lie, or one of them: ladies
had small feet, she’d say, big feet
were just boorish. So she crammed toes
in dainty leather spikers
on which she danced or tried to,

and it’s trying that hurts most,
even more than feet that ached by evening’s end
when tipsy but bedizened, balanced on stiletto heels,
she wobbled into my room to kiss and leave
a taste of perfume, smoke, and gin.

Left to me, her whole estate,
a scuffed-up, mothball fleet of shoes
harbored with regret and hardly worth the salvage,

but how dispose the hope to sail
through gales of brass and drums,
her shoes like wind-tossed caravels
cresting on a rhythm’s wave?


Still, I thought, they might suit
some downtown hipster’s fancy
and packed them in a Goodwill box
then whistled "In the Mood."
The whistle changed to humming,
humming into scatting, but no ladies
filled the floor, no gorgeous swinging ladies.

I slapped the beat against the wall,
slapping louder with each bar.

A Dental Digression


I can’t pronounce feckless
now my top front teeth are gone,
at least not clearly. I practice in the mirror—

the best I do is ekleth while I think of people
who suffered much for love,
and want to count myself among them.

Instead I suffered gum-disease
and habits I’d rather not go into.

For three years I wore braces
that cost my father plenty, a silver fence
across my mouth—though it never stopped me talking,
as my father often noted—but I should be grateful
for the profile he afforded.

I cut his life-support last week,
clicked him out like one of those light-bulbs
he was always railing to turn off:
thousands for a winning smile
but not an extra penny to Con Ed.

He was a Navy fighter pilot, and he thought me feckless.
I once asked him what happened to the dead.
They rot, he said.


Two days ago we burned him, as directed,
planted his ashes next to a bunch of dead people
who had a lot more money than he ever did—

just a poor bastard rubbing elbows
with the rich, as he once described himself.

I don’t know if he suffered much for love,
but I suspect he did. That might be why
I never told him about my teeth.
It would have killed him.

Eschatology at 4 A.M.

Comes the low-gear grind
of the long-pronged garbage truck
to offer up my weekly slough
in bloated plastic bags that break
like Beelzebubs piËatas, disgorging bottles,
last year’s shoes, old New Yorker magazines,

raucous scraps of gutted wants
crushed into a mass of Caesar’s castoff stuff,
hauled out to a landfill, bulldozed down a chasm.

With what angels looking on?

men in overalls, buzzards overhead,
the risen sun, and—the tongue stumbles on the word—
beauty, stripped-down beauty,
the world awake, remade.

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