poems: Saeed Jones

Room 31

Cigarette smoke
is the smell of the last couple here,
the ghost of their stains
still
on the sheets,
and the bed aches
with the weight
of my waiting.

I’ve left
the door ajar, enough
for night to push
its tongue into the room.

(Are you on your way?
Where did you tell your wife
you were going?)

Another hour –
A couple argues
in the next room;
Now, moans. I want
to see their faces.

I want to be their bed.

Another hour –
(You said 9.
It’s almost 12.)

I try to keep my eyes
off the carpet. It looks
like back hair, but

if you walked in
and asked me,

I would etch your name
into the shag

with the scrape of my knees.

Jerome, or The Resurrectionist

After the mourners clogged
his throat with marigolds
and pushed his headstone
into its permanent groove,
my lover returned to me
a cloud of butterflies,
blaze of monarchs
burning gold in my room,
every wall papered with beating
wings. The floor shuddered with color:
ochre and bronze strokes,
flecks of blackness like coal
in the lungs. Beating, always
beating. Breathing wings
curtained the window
and through their thin skin,
sunlight in its own death throws.
And then, the rush of wings against
my skin, a rain of gold between
my legs with him, with him, with him.

SAEED JONES received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. He’s a graduate of Western Kentucky University where he won the Jim Wayne Miller Award for Poetry. While at Western, he was the poetry editor for Rise Over Run Magazine. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications like StorySouth, Barnwood Magazine, Splinter Generation, TheAdirondack Review, Mary and Ganymede. He blogs regularly at saeedjones.wordpress.com.