Jessie Janeshek's second full-length book of poetry is The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017). Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming), and Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018). Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection.




Jessie Janeshek

We Bathe the World/Bathhouse Pageant



Success is all hollow I wear big purple glasses and your dirty sheet like a toga. I’m not leaving the steam. I’m not leaving the electronic massage torture chamber but you can send me a message on the elevator via machine: walk back to your cabin/someone will kill you so they can go live there. Haunted jazz babies haunt best in hog pink but I dream of the smell of the old yellow phonebook I dream of a high chair, playing school crushed velvet hollow add risk and suspense lavender jabbering Al Capone grabbing my ass on a bench. That bird is hoarse. I can hear owls from town and I feel your claws your namesake steps and down my back your slap-lack of narrative your slimy kiss. You’re eating an apple and I’m afraid of tight jockey shorts the fake rattle snake stuffed with the light stuff and how do I come across above and beyond and below all the blondes and the breasts that make war and there’s always been orange and range and there’s always been ballistic missiles muscles and hunger no teeth and now I just notice because I love him and now I just fuck in the backroom at The Vapors and weep for the last of the Hollywood meteors then you lower me down wrapped in loose bloody towels to the cooling room.

I wrote “We Bathe the World/Bathhouse Pageant” while I was an artist-in-residence at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas. Hot Springs is unique because the town itself — including the ornate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bathhouses that make up Bathhouse Row — is part of the park. I was eager to explore the history of the town, and I became more excited when I discovered the tawdry past of Hot Springs; in the first few decades of the twentieth century it was a hangout for gangsters, movie and theatre stars, and drunken baseball players on spring training. My work frequently engages with the jazz age and/or 1920s and 1930s Hollywood, so what I learned at Hot Springs dovetailed nicely with my long-time obsessions and gave me some new fodder. Additionally, while touring the Fordyce Bathhouse, I got to examine artifacts of the “therapies” that had been offered at that time, some of which looked more like torture to me, and a bit of that imagery pervades the poem as well.



Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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