a love's little scratching

slip into this
wool sweater
our marriage
still warm
still green

our fingers tangle
with the sleeves
did you see
could it be
the cuffs unravel?

who can tell us
how to snip the yarn,
card the wool
hold our strands
together?

we left our mothers
at the alter
we were cleaved
and we are making
home this bond

something so close
a love's little scratching
fibers
raising blood
day after day

missed signals
and blind eye
turned away
the cheek I hold
soft under my hand

this is the way weaving
tortoiseshells
into our blanket
the marriage only we
can understand

Written by Reka Jellema and Jennifer Savage
Copyright September 2015

An Editorial
In memory of Jim Heil

We’d like to think it was a spotted gull
Some grace of light that tricked the water green
That made you turn and paddle toward the moon,
Away from afternoon matinees
And the newsroom, deadlines and bylines
And lame editorials -- you spat them out
like sawdust, sought the woods
And Michigan.

A snowy owl lifts her wings; racoons rut
For garbage. At your old place we pick
Our objects. Stones from
Superior, that bowl
Filled with acorns, a button-down
Still smelling of your sweat, those
Nights, that hospital bed, the countdown
To last breaths:

We make ourselves at home:
There's kindling in the grate
good dry wood. The beat cop
Makes fire and we sit, hands cupped
Round mugs, hands fitted
On bony knees like caps.

You should have seen yourself,
Lord Jim,
Sunken. Wrinkled skin-
Bone cold
What did you expect,
Marathoner who lived
On carrot sticks? A drowned bird
Who'd been in the lake too long.

I got the call.
November surf, a kayak
Spit from a Great Lake,
A turn, adrift
This life, a lone
Gray wave.

By Reka Jellema
Copyright
August 2015

Black Rain

I saw a robin today,
soaked, all black, even
its breast
caught in a downpour
of black rain.

A bird unmoved
by the squall
of electric guitar crashing
from the open window
of a muscle car.

My mind, that cheap
crackling speaker, noticed
what the bird ignored:

A wake
of white static
dissolving into wakefulness.

A man in an icebox
drinking coffee
black
from a Styrofoam cup.

A yellow lab frozen
to the sidewalk.

A black bird
inked on the guns of the girl
with her psyche
in a knot.

Hot blood pooled
on the pavement
losing its red
in a pool of white
lamplight

Where did you go
when my wallet closed
and I heard
the flap and slosh
of my heart defect?

Why didn't we rise
above the drone and hum
and sing along
with robins?

Or tune in, my lost friend,
when robins became
silhouettes and the city
scraped dogs
off the street?

It was then my mind
pulled its drawstrings
- closed in upon itself -
while clocks tick despair, and

You reached
for a feather,
for flight, for the grip
of talons on a wire,
for second sight

While the robin,
blinded by black rain
stared away

By Reka Jellema and Tzod Earf
Copyright July 2015

Blue China Plate

If you shook the earth, if
between cymbal and snare, you lifted her up,
grasped in both hands, maracas
in a band
you didn't know you'd joined,
how would she sound, s'pended 'tween
the deaf moon, a void
and a sun overreached with ambition?

The view of her from Saturn a blue
China plate flung
at the wall of space
and shattered, pieced
back together, cracks
crooning at every jolt,
an earth-lurch that crunched,
a sprung reverb chord
coiled and recoiled
called upon and recalled

Would the cool kids say
she sounded seismic? Jangly pop
or rock rattling the lithosphere?
And who would listen? Who would feel the rhythm
in capillaried secrets spread
beneath the soil? All the severed ears
would crawl like worms
suckled on cake dirt
dirt caked and iced and
sliced uneven into borders
bands of shaken brothers still
only following orders

By Reka Jellema and Brendan Bonsack
Copyright June 25, 2015

ceiling -- I have known
your open eye
the slope of white descend
and blind, the slap
of your gloss surface,
felt it press on my illness
levitate above my fixed
sight, the top of a box

the ways we bled
a glass of lucid
another glass
and then the end

will this be one of those nights
operatic in my head
the lamp-lit sun speeding round
the catatonic
fixed
just little trickles
between the stitches
the round burns

and this -- understudy
to the abyss
your watery wink
O death
the depth,
the anchor sinks
beneath the weight of wave
heaviness oceanic,
I get lost
when I go under

the wreck
the wrack of self
a magnitude that sharks
plow through
uneaten 
to the surface, nibbling the edges
of the unconscious

all along I hid

within an upper floor
within a room
a single bed
cheese squares in the fridge
a cup of pills
a man in scrubs 
a host of diagnoses dressed
in paper gowns, 

this is where
I live


By Reka Jellema & Jennifer Savage
Copyright April 24, 2015