Jenna Coburn

revolving doors, what have i done?

i get lost on purpose

drive into the mountains like

maybe i’m waiting for a cliff

like maybe route 44 will go off the grid

unmap itself

from my neurons and from google both

i brake disgusted

reminded of the guy who took the hairpin too fast

and didn’t even make a dent in the ridge

reminded how it looms so large with every rev

till all i see is rock

, road

, and impossibly the flightiest glimpse of

vanishing point

so distant from the guy who escaped the sky

i pull over next to smoking trucks and their smoking drivers

silhouetted against a valley so vast it may as well be nothing

a pipedream projected somewhere

beyond

some etching from the silurian period

that i won’t understand (not even when i’m older)

i’m sorry i’m late

i get lost on purpose

but i still repeat myself:

the second the county signs change color

i’m shivering at the lookout

i’m swinging around and glancing nervously at the sun

i’m slamming my brakes at the hairpin

neither earth nor air nor new

just home.

sorry i’m late

but i’m here.

i parked at the end of the driveway

like always.

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Jenna Coburn (she/they) is a graduate student completing her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling at SUNY New Paltz. She hopes to continue work as a therapist in the Hudson Valley after graduating. In her free time, she enjoys knitting, playing Stardew Valley, and petting all the wonderful dogs in her life.

autophobe

i laugh without listening

and cancel all my plans

in black and white

dressing every windshield in dew

i dream of you in bars

in bars

i wake up wallowing

hollow

in all our distances and headaches

every day a virgin hangover

my dry eyes are roof tiles

in wait

for acid to come pouring

out of a cracked ceramic sky

umbrellaless

i cancel plans ’cause of my veins’

caramel sludge cravings ever

clear embers and

candy climbing tumbles

i crumple through the openings

of every suburban sliding glass door

to sear the acoustics of some stranger’s

morning cigarettes

make clouds

and disappear into vapor-burned valleys

i cancel plans ’cause the moon has been full for three months

and the atmosphere’s been seizing grandly

in time to my throat’s theatrics,

in time to the tics of my lighter’s

flickers and clicking calls

that won’t stop

’cause i don’t leave my bed

 

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Jenna Coburn is a senior psychology major and English minor at SUNY Geneseo. She is from the Hudson Valley where she enjoys caring for her cacti, doodling, writing poems, and annoying her family via the guitar. This is her first published work.

if you have ghosts (you have everything)

i never met my grandfather till today—

he dies in 1975

and today he was born

at the bottom of a drawer in the kitchen,

his coffin and crib:

he is swaddled in moth-eaten dish towels

by a nameless undertaker

or perhaps the autophagic author himself

his crib and coffin:

he was buried a lifetime,

deaf to my own cacophonous et cetera

amidst cardboard boxes

he arises, stretches

and sits on our couch, transparent and whispering

his earliest recollections in ink from distant trenches:

he eats sliced-up milky way bars,

listens to little orphan annie and the manhattan rainstorms

as they flood his empty pillowcase;

my earliest recollection is a blank notebook,

never happened,

didn’t fall from the sky till three-quarters of a century later,

in drops of impossible invisible ink

in 1934 i smell decades-old storms,

tobacco smoked by children

and today he tastes dough

from hands of women he could have loved

together we break toys, apologize to our ghosts

listen to drops on macadam phantoms.

we think tonight was cloudy.

we left identical sleigh tracks in identical snow

laughed identical laughs whose echoes and imprints

are separated only by city and by many, many newspapers.

we remembered the same sun,

the same rain and lightning

and we both wrote that we might be heard over the century’s thunder

but stopped, hid, tired, retired—

shaking hands

halfway to tomorrow,

never touching—

two strange strangers

left sleepless and motionless in the same notebooks,

the same house:

in the same cradles and the same coffins.

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Jenna Coburn is a senior psychology major and English minor at SUNY Geneseo. She is from the Hudson Valley where she enjoys caring for her cacti, doodling, writing poems, and annoying her family via the guitar. This is her first published work.