Glossary
Jake Sheff
(of the happy hunting ground as photographed by Ansel Adams)
After Brenda Shaughnessy
Aspens:
(esp. kudos) Somebody’s comedy
underneath the echo’s lamp
and Donatello’s donated stars.
Where gaps in knowledge are
a tropical disease. Where virgin
day is on the verge of baling hay.
(see also Doohickey)
Capitan, El:
The happiest woman to ever live, singing,
in the most homely and unassuming style
it is possible to imagine:
“In the writer’s windy mind,
lovely turns to lonely in no time.”
Cash, Johnny and the Condors:
Where shadows are polite
from no small amount of overeating,
at one and the same time, clavis
will be prevailed upon by clavus
to rhyme with gravis.
Clearing Winter Storm:
The lyrics lurking in the equinox
creep from their distant mouth.
And all conclusions are concussed.
A quiet judge; the judgment’s ocean
spray from the censer’s chains.
Fermi Paradox, The:
The stars’ vanilla chiming while the roses
do their best, but sound like blenders blending.
The simpleton kissing booth above beats
the crap out of Virtuosity (Rarity times Contrariety);
isn’t very receptive to our blitz (“Less foolish isn’t wiser!”).
Matchmaker’s Concubine, The:
Where the day is so hot, the desire
to be famous catches fire, and the night
is so cold, the beautiful adjectives
freeze, and fall off. Where midnight
envies poverty, but sings, in the Dolce
Stil Novo with a voice traveling hot-foot
and swapping eyes with ransacked
parcels of parsecs: “Proximity is love’s
musician; stealth, its magic wand.”
Monolith:
A rooster’s half-annunciation,
on a silver platter with a note:
Remember to tip your attendant.
And the note will drink your drink.
(Example: The rattle of rowlocks.)
Moon with Cropped Hair:
The severe connotations of a naked song,
drunk inside a trunk with the dead of night,
declensions and some other junk.
(see also Dimly lit insurgent, a)
Moonrise, Stock-still, in February’s Library:
Slim pickings, and the benefits of cruelty,
are prowling wolves in wonderment.
Wool: in a dyer’s vat or jerboa’s imagination.
(see also Killer’s child, a)
Rose and Driftwood:
When the handsome sun will tell the lake
effect to cool its heterosexual jets, in
the style not of a plebeian but of a patrician.
Between decluttering the clergyman’s
hyperglycemic dataset. (You had to be there.)
Winter Sunrise:
A cunning lad; the iris of resistance.
(Example: The end’s beginning to beguile the beginning.)
(on anger) With hunger satisfied before it’s fed.
Or with radiance redefined as greater than a king
by a solitary tree (esp. a dragon fruit lychee).
(as gratuity) Blindfolded, with the lightning’s lymph.
Jake Sheff is a pediatrician in Oregon. He's married with a daughter and six pets. Poems of Jake’s are in Radius, The Ekphrastic Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cossack Review and elsewhere. He won 1st place in the 2017 SFPA speculative poetry contest and a Laureate's Choice prize in the 2019 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Past poems and short stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook is “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing).