Poetry

Jennessa Hester is a transgender writer and scholar working out of Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, HAD, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She serves as a managing editor for the Iron Horse Literary Review and poetry editor for Wrong Publishing. Find her on social at @cherrypoppunk.

My story starts not where the bullet pierces flesh but where the blood pools all around. Some waves of pain never stop, no matter how well one writes of healing. My story starts symbolically as a mirror in front of which I knot my necktie, half-Windsor, the way my late father taught me years ago, …

I can never see that river again. I should have guessed the last time would be the last time. Walking there I smelled the riverbed, its desperate stench released by the sun bleaching it as it does bone. Down the solitary road began our village. Feral cats spread eye infections among themselves. Rye stalks shuddered …

Grandpa looked down, eating an apple, which was exactly what this fawn was doing behind our field when I drove a slug through its guts. He put ripe fruit in his mouth, the juice oozing out into the white bramble of his beard. I stuck his buck knife in the young deer, cut out its …

My first time visiting my mother’s country I’m eight and she finds me in the street counting the stars because Moca has more than Montauk and these stars are strung to my anchor-heart. She says we all have a star and if you count your star you die. I keep counting and she stops finding …

The severed deer leg said red, as if red were something to be said. My head fell off and rolled over the mossy embankment. I followed, my neck austere and cold and salmonberry-covered, running with a colored orange and the yellow sun coming up over the edge of the canyon though we could not see …

on a tuesday evening in brooklyn they burned my grandmother alive struck her across the face and set her clothes ablaze their footsteps and their laughter rang out through the city streets as the flames licked at her skin and her hair and in immolation she became holy symbol alight in protest of the indignities …

you say fuck me so loud you swallow the sounds from next door my fingers slide into your clit soaking my grandmas body stopped two hours ago & yours arches towards me it is almost ontological my calloused palms melt into your waist & i squeeze my grandmas waist wasting away you breathe my name …

the scout master called my father says and i can tell by the switch in his throat that this is the night he will die we head to church an hour before the troop meeting master waits for us outside watches as we stomp through unkempt oklahoma grasses no one’s bothered to mow down now …

Winner of the 2023 49th Parallel Award for Poetry I want to fit something here about how my father used to console me—told me I was a poor thinker because, when I was a baby, I got so smart so fast God placed a worm in my ear to eat my wisdom. Balance me out. …