“Three Poems,” Poetry, Jesi Bender.

I.

The Dioscuri are Born as One

For K.C.

In a hospital on the hill          

Out broke a cry                      

A hymn in June         

Stills the sound of an angry sky—

A fire sparked at the edges

Four moonstone eyes             

            Contrapuntal—          

            The fecundity of Time lies—

Pale music of your new muscle         

Turn to the self                                  

            Circle circles—                     

            Your silhouettes form a trustle—      

The rest of my life will now be

Measured by yours

The only one

Who knows what lives inside of me—

 II.

MATTER | ANTIMATTER

For every thing there is an equal

and opposite thing, {another: action/object}

                                        a/symmetry 

that weights us to and repels us from

the moment they meet there is an instant

annihilation {another: greater illumination}

What I want is so far from what I need

superpositioned as a crux we call will

power is not a fundamental property of life as it is

the opposite the antagonist the antiparticles—

{another: the partner}

The galactic center is a cloud of antimatter

that balances us on a profusion of invisible strings

above the abyss {another: nothingness}

Invert inversion and see again how nothing 
is still something if we give it enough 

attention {another: sweet satellite}

You are not equal {another: identical}

to me you are not the opposite {another: contradiction}

either the cosmos is inflating like a womb or decay

And all I have are these dumb words

To separate desire from require {another: end}

III.

Barren | Bloom
(Originally published in Sip Cup 2017)

When you have multiple babies, your uterus starts to fall – it’s the womb trying to escape itself.  With each pregnancy, parts of Franfreida Glück that once held strong against gravity now genuflected in its presence. 

Franfreida’s children had all grown and left her.  Mr. Glück was dead.  She was alone, watching her body become a dry field of muted mud colors. 

To silence the pinch in her lower abdomen, she decided to put something somewhere abandoned long ago.  The first thing she saw was a potato.  Once inside, she was pleased with how well it held her together. 

Weeks passed and Franfreida forgot that specific pain until, sitting on the toilet, she noticed several lithe tendrils descended into the bowl.  Their smell was horrible.  Each verdant stalk was covered in an opaque mucus. 

She delicately felt to the end of one stem and, despite the fog in her eyes, she was sure that she had lifted a flower from the water – a bloom of diaphanous, deep-purple petals.  Through her trembling fingers, she thought she felt a pulse.  Smiling, she began to cry.

Franfreida Glück was a woman who stuck a potato between her legs and managed to grow a garden. 

Jesi Bender is an artist from Upstate New York. She is the author of the novel Child of Light (Whiskey Tit), the chapbook Dangerous Women (dancing girl press), the play Kinderkrankenhaus (Sagging Meniscus), and the novel The Book of the Last Word (Whiskey Tit). Her shorter work has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Denver Quarterly, FENCE, and Sleepingfish, among others. The Brooklyn production of Kinderkrankenhaus was a top-three finalist for the BroadwayWorld’s Best Off-Broadway Play 2023.