Skip to content
  • Home
    • Featured
      • Poetry
      • A Few Good Men
      • Friends + Family
      • Dating + Relationships
      • Women’s Issues + Awareness
  • About us
    • Contributors
  • Books
  • Submit
    • Copyright Policy
    • General Terms of Use
    • Contact
Latest:
Scylla and Charybdis
The Other Side
Guard the Rose
Runaway Slave: Symbol and Witness
Cicadian Rhythms
Betty

FEMININE COLLECTIVE

Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered

  • Home
    • Featured
      • Poetry
      • A Few Good Men
      • Friends + Family
      • Dating + Relationships
      • Women’s Issues + Awareness
  • About us
    • Contributors
  • Books
  • Submit
    • Copyright Policy
    • General Terms of Use
    • Contact
  • Home
  • Jen Rouse

Author: Jen Rouse

Jen Rouse’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Midwestern Gothic, Wicked Alice, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, Up the Staircase, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2018 Prize Issue and was the winner of the 2017 Gulf Stream Summer Contest Issue. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

Distillation

August 28, 2018August 27, 2018 Jen Rouse

20 drops per minute. Until the liquid turned vapor leaves a residue so intoxicatingly flammable, everything smells like risk. She said, let’s create a vessel. Let’s create an apparatus. Let’s slow the process, no need for this hemorrhage of light. We will dissolve, return, split, and form again, with greater Read more

Featured, PoetryJen Rouse, poetryLeave a comment

The Hypatia State

July 24, 2018August 25, 2018 Jen Rouse

My father said, “You will be a perfect human.” And I wondered, as a child, if I was not human, was I serpent, perhaps? perhaps circle, eclipse, or parabola? the curve of a flat plane cutting through a cone? Was I, at all, beautiful? Women, they said, were not human. Read more

PoetryJen Rouse, poetry, religionLeave a comment

Attraction

May 28, 2018May 30, 2018 Jen Rouse

A distance between belief and science? Are we enlightened? Are we sublime? What is extraordinary? This mermaid of scales and papier mâché or a sand and stone Goliath?  Are you a wonder? Or artful deception? Have you ever gazed upon a basilisk, a wicked Jenny Haniver? Have you been Humbugged? Read more

PoetryJen Rouse, poetryLeave a comment

Thorn and Kiss

May 16, 2018June 11, 2018 Jen Rouse

You bite your lip in nervous habit, a tiny blossom of blood rises. I want to put my thumb there, to taste the salt and pain. In nervous habit, I want this blood to rise like a rose against your thigh. Tiny blossom against my lips. I want your bite, Read more

PoetryJen Rouse, love, poetry, relationshipsLeave a comment

Recent Posts

  • Scylla and Charybdis
  • The Other Side
  • Guard the Rose
  • Runaway Slave: Symbol and Witness
  • Cicadian Rhythms
  • Betty
  • Little Losses
  • the mother in me
  • WHERE SHE HAS FALLEN
  • Smoke Break
Copyright © 2013-2024 Feminine Collective
  • Home
  • About us
  • Books
  • Submit
Magazine Power by WEN Themes