
'Self-Portrait In Hobohemia' & 'Jack Rabbit': Two Poems by Jessie Lynn McMains

SELF-PORTRAIT IN HOBOHEMIA
didn’t know what I was in for when I caught
out for the first time: no
one warned me
the only warnings given were the practical kind: beware
railroad bulls & rednecks
beware: lost limbs & death: no traingel
with his battered hat & ragged, soot-lined wings
told me: turn back
told me: if you don’t you’ll never again fit at all into that world of norms
& stay-at-homes: no
matter how many years it’s been since the last
time
so that that May day in Minneapolis: I walked past the factories of broken glass
& the carrion birds digging in the trash: down
to the tracks & hopped aboard a blue boxcar & I was never again
a stay-at-home: no
matter how long I’ve been at home: I still take walks alongside the tracks: haunt the graffitied yards of parked hopper cars
looking for a sign: left by a hobo I used to know
reading the spray-painted paeans of those
I don’t: worship satan / smoke meth: Chicago killed me
other times I just stand there: my boots rooting into the mud, like: I might start growing rail-side
like the summer
chicory: the ladies waiting in their indigo dresses
but I’m not waiting for my lover to return from war: I’m waiting
to glimpse myself: hopping from a train
car, fleet footed in muddy boots, coat flapping behind me, black & tattered as a traingel
or a dumpster-bird: it’s spring again & like every year:
the train whistles bloom through the rust belt
backyards: so thick after a heavy rain: I could run
my hand through the air & pluck a bouquet of them:
by summer they’ll have grown wild & strange, lank bristled things: along the roadside: going
to seed:
o one day I swear: I’ll float away on the breeze: dandelion puff,
the whistle & the steam: I’ll wake, drunk: nestled in the belly
of a gondola
watching stars draw themselves on the darkling
sky: one day::
I’ll never be going
back home
JACK RABBIT
Five months: bellyful and three months: away from leaving
the west coast to return midward, I needed movement.
Pregnancy turned me fever-fidget, like I knew once I gave
birth I’d be anchored, and was I going to go it alone, hard-
scrabble or: scramble back to the man I’d wed and take
him with me. I drove to some middle of north-anywhere
California place, I don’t know: what side of the Bay
Bridge was I on, just a spot in the low hills, dirt paths and
scrub brush, scent of sage, low drone of planes high
overhead, and no: where, no one around, then a tremble
in the bushes and there: she was, jack, rabbit, long-legged, a deer
in the body of a hare, eyes dark dinner plates, black-tipped
ladles for ears, velvet-fur with smears of tan, sandy brown, raw
umber, kobicha. We stood: at a dozen paces, two duelers in the split
before the clash of steel or the gun’s report: our moment hung
like a pearl on the necklace of eternity, I saw the paths of veins
in the pink scoops of her ears, her whiskers twitching, in her eyes:
the whole swirl of the cosmos and I yearned: to snap her neck
and pluck her ocular orbs, certain if I put them in my mouth
I’d taste the blackberry juice of galaxies being born, and I’d know
all: the secrets of the universe slicking my tongue to oil. Yet I
wanted her: to live forever, for nothing to ever harm her. I let her
go: small dust-cloud and black-brush tail hopping away from me, I was
left knowing only my restless: hare-heart thumping in my chest,
rabbit-baby kicking inside me with his not-yet-human feet.
Jessie Lynn McMains (they/them) is a poet, writer, zine-maker, small press publisher, and spoken word performer. They are the author of multiple chapbooks, most recently The Girl With The Most Cake and forget the fuck away from me. They have been publishing their own and others’ writing in zines and chapbooks since 1994, and have been performing their work across the US and Canada since 1998. They were the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Racine, WI, and currently write a reoccuring column for Pussy Magic. You can find their personal website at recklesschants.net, or follow them on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie.