by Stephan Crown-Weber
The Baby Jessicas
This dog is a Jessica with her baby Jessica teeth front and center.
You have to talk to a baby Jessica. Jessica was the Other old sister who hid upstairs with the lights off and waited for her sibling to call for her. The tired, paper voice translated into little dots of enamel.
There are also caves crawling with baby Jessicas, Millions of hidden, golden ones. Mist on their Jessica tongues.
Hollow baby Jessica bones.
Little teeth like the kind the stranger who approached me at the public library talked about.
( “I paint porcelain with tiny touches.”)
White ceramic angels on the top shelf apparently. Baby Jessica aliens with pools of moon crystal eyes.
The dog bares her fangs and she’s is the roughest Jessica who has transponded to meanlet.
Greedy craver.
In the clouds, the True Baby Jessica outside of clocks has always had it in her.
I shout Baby Jessica at the dog and she ignores me.
Like the girl at the doctor’s office getting her hair brushed by a grandma who called her Precious—except of course we also all have radical destinies.
Rain Country
A rain country cropped up overnight.
Children instinctively knew that all the land that could turn green was gerrymandered out.
Mud backed up in the bottomlands before it could empty into streams.
There were suddenly already stone fences crossing yellow pastures under grey skies from here all the way to the river and farther east, disappearing in the supreme fog of the first mountain.
By the morning, it was entirely ancient.
How could it not be?
People had storied thoughts about taxes.
Grandpa chair bourbon. Dulcimer sasquatch waterfalls.
Deep systems beyond basketball from when Daniel Boone was discovered by The Mummies.
This country can’t happen again.
There’s no road to the beach anyway.
According to a dream, there’s high demand for a route straight to Daytona from the hinterland, crossing the upper sky above Disney World.
The tires of this ATV will have eaten this country alive.
That will last as long as no schools open and no one notices that there is no famous hospital.
It’s running out of the easy kind of shadows.
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Stephan Crown-Weber is a writer and translator from out in the country in Central Kentucky. He tries not to be a fiend.