Selected Poems | Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

#4 Amber (C₁₀H₁₆ O + H₂S) 

the neighbors stomped around between walls and I wonder why there are too many worlds to get lost
in Amber harnessing the magical energy of the sun

what if my own circle isn’t big enough or because there is just one of them

he comes in all flannel and I am busy writing my way into my life

my horror movie girls and bare midriffs on the rise why do you have to be pretty to be murdered?
small pieces melted together

we rotate over cacti and resinous dirt and sneak around

the gloves in the washer / the book store is closed on Sunday / in the rain / but the gelato store is open

the bike trail was called Short and Cranky but once you return to real Tuesdays you just become a
vacation wife light enough to float on water

He also tells me there is an animal in his mouth and it died and this makes me laugh

uncontrollably but I also know the animal is dangerous with a Hardness level of 2 and younger

#5 Diopside (CaMg(SiO₃)₂) 

I cannot pry you open and feel your outer barbs
the finest and most precious :

the soft palate needs to lift to make sound but sometimes we are silenced in the mud
Diopside stimulates new cycles of growth

this is mud season after all the Uber driver tells me
he is helping his mom drive to Disneyland later this week and offer protection from the evil eye

you apologize for being on your phone for two hours at that brewery and then the sunrise
where we got carbon monoxide poisoning and you say just don’t be a tourist

but I feel like a stranger seeing the best in things
who else will take a photo of this dinosaur skeleton riding a bicycle?

reverse a negative emotional state, be granular

the redness of our faces and tomatoes on signs and the roundness of pizza and body sections

I cannot fill up enough on your forearms that move away into the fog and hail in the middle of spring

the rare violet blue of your entrenched insides

#6 Sphene (CaTiSiO₅)

She says yes and how your dog loves me

when I clear my emotional stress with a combination of Rose quartz and Sphene laying at my heart

how I want your dog in crop tops and summer yellow
home is unannounced drop-ins but you warn me your time is limited

card games and more paint to drown in
he shortens words and challenges with pink

Magic : offer solutions to a problem 
Align subtle bodies

my knives aren’t sharpened on a regular basis and no one describes rock colors as “rarely clean”
especially with metamorphic rocks with a hardness of 5.5

Sphene is sometimes used as an imitation stone for more valuable rocks such as Topaz
I watched your hips go up and down on that mountain bike in deeply entrenched conditions
white fluffy clouds and the buildings and the silver buffalo and these are all accounts of a breast
bone and delicate jade plant roots that fall out of the pot

look for a warm beast flank to call home on a brow chakra
Motivate and drive into apples

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens lives in the Midwest and has poems published in Yalobusha Review, Cleaver, and Dream Pop Press. Her fourth full length book of poetry, We’re Going to Need a Higher Fence, recently came out from Lit Fest Press.