It’s the one about the bears and their blonde:
In their many beds I left many cells,
called my multiple personalities down,
their faces to the sky
a slide show of cheap reference, chanteuses
orphaned by a wave of bear.
Life should have piano accompaniment—
so as Goldilocks (in my delusion)
I staged a three-part musical. Flowers crooned.
I burned the script into my hand: Ingénue
crosses a whistling Mason-Dixon
toward a tomorrow not to be believed,
puts down among the blooms, hums a tune,
loses her mind. Mind wanders to a stage,
becomes a voice, multifarious, shot
to the balcony. A sound engineer
asks her to say her name into the mic.
Test. Test. Test. She writes three chapters. She sleeps
in three beds. There are three movements to this,
one too soft, two too hard but Child
Mind falls asleep, dreams of wood, whole houses
under her weight crumbling. Perfection
is cruel, the detonator, what unbraids
her hair, those three strands forgiving themselves
for the trouble of coming together.
Lesley Jenike /
October 3, 2018
Three Enter the Dark Wood
About The Author
Lesley Jenike
Lesley Jenike’s essays and poems have appeared or will appear soon in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, The Cincinnati Review, The Bennington Review, Rattle, Verse, and many other journals.
Her most recent collections are a chapbook of poems, Punctum: published by Kent State University Press and a full-length poetry collection Holy Island published by Gold Wake; both books were released in 2017.
She teaches creative writing and literature at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with my husband and two small children.
