She is the space oddity hurtling
through the weekend of a full eclipse
She lingers in the aisles:
strange energy in her wake
uses crying-emoji lip balm
to express the loss of a child—
I should be wary, but am fascinated
by the rounded, yellow case and blue pictotears,
by her sad, sweet, tired face, her tousled, sandy hair
like a child’s after a too-long, summer’s day.
She finds herself a victim:
of the court system, which took her “child/product;”
of people she thought were her friends;
of the Hollywood system,
as she cannot remember
how she got her star on the Walk of Fame,
and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce
won’t give her any information.
She finds enemies:
in those who have taken
all of her good ideas and so her film credits
and in the legion of actresses
who use her exact shade of hair dye for a part
so that she can’t buy it for herself.
She says she has to be so, so careful,
these days, what she co-creates
Jennifer Kemnitz is a great defender of plant life, which she finds uniquely, innately intelligent. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from CALYX, Cirque, Rain, and the Kerf, and has been anthologized by Poetry on the Lake, among others. She has served as Managing Editor of VoiceCatcherand is a bookseller in the PPR at Powell’s City of Books.