Jennifer Lemming

Mis-en-Scene

by Jennifer Lemming

The movie addict clutched the case full of money. He knew this had to play out just right.

That timing was everything he had learned from all those movies he had watched.

The used car salesman and the banker were skeptical. He could see the hesitation and doubt in their faces as they stared at him across the table. They had underestimated him.

He turned it all over in his mind: the chase scenes, foul-ups, plot twists to be revealed. And lastly, and with precision, he thought of all those great escapes.

His sweaty palms shifted ever so slightly as he tightened his grip on the handles.

These guys, he looked at them as they all sat there, waiting in silence. They weren’t capable of sharing his scope, he decided, they just didn’t have his vision.

They were day jobbers, playing the support to his dramatic lead.

A small smile played on his lips, and he knew it had begun.

The Afternoon

by Jennifer Lemming

Clutching at the brisk wind and fading wools, she felt as cold as all her lost assumptions.

She made it inside to her kitchen and was acting most peculiar. Her moods, jarred by revisits to the horrible mess in the car left her with only enough energy to just gaze at the striations in the rock of the countertop which, she thought, did little to coax her away from immature emotional growth.

She glanced at the leftover lunch, fixating on the spinach leaf, arched limply backwards, soaked in oil. She gazed outside through the glassed panes of the dining room’s French doors, into her backyard, at the bird feeder where she saw the little sparrows stretched out for food. And she thought even the birds also wanted her attention, but all this filled her with apprehension.

Feeling that it was the ultimate expression of her exurb, bathed in the soft autumn’s palpable amber glow, a gelled resin made worthy by envy. It would be days before they found her body in the garage.

She turned her vision back into her kitchen, all her emotional jargon clamped together, just bits of frosting oozing from beneath curled, pale linoleum.

One for the Road, I Guess

by Jennifer Lemming

Yeah, that girl, the one with the swaying breasts

in the sequin dress, uh, halter, I dunno,

is that blood splatters across her top, uh no, the glittering of sequins

swaying and jiggling to and fro, God, you’d think

I was drinking liquid acid not Scotch on the rocks,

maybe I’m just overtired, or just tired but I can’t,

I just can’t take my eyes off her swaying salmon pink and blood-splattered top

that cover her enthusiasm so hypnotically. . . .

My heart is both object and verb,

and is lined with the tackiness of tomato-red blood.

Veins and arteries are the construct, my life

is the experience and the nattiness of blood,

and sinew, is taylor-made for pumping

almost casually to the disco-beat of life,

and our love courses through it all,

which is the anecdote and bleeds plot and point,

All I can think of is that

life is a lot of shit

mixed with stardust and blood,

as I continue to try to drink

my bloodlust sullenness away.

Love in the time of wolves

by Jennifer Lemming

I walk the floor of the forest glen,

and through the tall prairie grass

late, late at night. Aching with the need

to pair, to mate

and underneath a howling moon

with lupine pining

I bend my head to drink

from the occasional stream,

wetting my blood-caked jowls.

I Do

by Jennifer Lemming

I DO

Bells hanging,

tied on satin strands in my hair.

A low E echoing my “I do”

Do I do

Wearing it until it returns organic,

I will not change my gown.

Do I do

Letting my hair grow into the lace

trim of my collar, like

ivy pushing into the lattice

ribs around my heart.

Do I do

I will use a garter snake to

hold up my stocking

Belted around my thigh,

swallowing his own tail.

Do I do, eternally

Originally published under the title of “I Do” poem Nov. 23, 2000, The Sentimentalist Magazine, Vol. V.

Jennifer Lemming won Grand Prize for her poetry in the Dancing Poetry Contest in 2019. Her poems and short fiction have been published in online and print journals. Her latest chapbook, Star Slough, was published by Dark Heart Press, March 2019. She lives in Bismarck, North Dakota.