Distillation

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

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.

The Hypatia State

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

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.

Attraction

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

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.

Thorn and Kiss

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

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.