Leveler Poetry Journal
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Jenny

 

It is no friendly world.

With men boring pocks
into the ground.
Pocks for hiding in,
for rising up out of
in white, deaf, bone silence.

 

Embarrassing, to be afraid,
never to be the right
animal at the right time. Men,
jaws cocked, forever nearing.
Men in pockets of the
neighborhood dark.

 

But from the street I can smell
something blue: someone has
used too much laundry soap.
I want now to be folded into
the breast of a plush cow.
I want to have many mothers.




Lindsay Macik

levelheaded: Jenny

 

From “boring pocks /  into the ground” to their “white, deaf, bone silence” to their existence in “the / neighborhood dark,” the “men” in this poem are a reservoir of potential violence. There’s little doubt that this reflects certain demographic facts, but this tightly composed poem is more interested in emotional truth, which increases in complexity as the poem progresses.

 

The first line of the poem opens us into the speaker’s unfriendly “world.” The ”pocks” of the first stanza – foxholes perhaps – are recalled in the second stanza’s “pockets” and in the wonderfully blunt double entendre, “cocked.” Men start and fight wars. Men are largely responsible for street crime. “Men” is repeated thrice in the first two stanzas, reminding us that the poem’s violence is tied to directly to maleness, to sex, to cocks and pockets.

 

There’s no telling who Jenny is, nor why this poem takes her name as its title. The speaker both warns and consoles the titular Jenny. The first line of the poem, “It is no friendly world,” recalls Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” Both lines are warnings about a particular geographical area. And both poems end with a kind of hopeful resignation. In “Jenny,” hope arrives a woman.

 

This brings us to the final stanza. With the word “But,” the poem takes a definite turn. The phrase “something blue” alludes to the wedding tradition: something borrowed, something blue, etc., etc. It may also suggest a baby – a purposefully male baby. Regardless, maternity and femininity dominate the final lines. “Laundry soap” suggests a domesticity that, for better or worse, is associated by smell with motherhood. (At the very least, “laundry” seems to oppose the poem’s “war.” Women in the poem are the ones who put the world back in order after their man-children go out and play trifling war games). There’s the “breast” of a purposefully female “plush cow.” And finally, there’s the outright desire “to have many mothers,” wherein the speaker finds hope in the idea that femaleness, domesticity, and comfort can be a salve for violence, fear, and bad memories.

 

 

-The Editors