Two Poems by Daniel Jenkins (poetry, ’18)

I loved everything about writing for Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project this past August. Yes. I did have a mental breakdown. But who wouldn’t? Writing poems on demand was, well, demanding. After a conversation about love poems with some of my closest friends from Warren Wilson, I decided embrace an insane virtual tour of the world through the voice of a speaker searching for a lost love. This involved a ton of research on place and culture. Wow. Not only did it bring closer to the world at large, but to my little world here. After a while, the majestic and mysterious swallowed me whole, stretched my imagination. One stop included Mountain River Cave in Vietnam—the largest in the world. Once the poem appeared on the Tupelo 30/30 blog, I received a friend request from a girl who worked as a tour guide for  Mountain River Cave. My favorite experience came when writing poems for friends who’d donated to support my campaign. I wrote about destinations and themes important to them, which was much more satisfying. I feel I grew closer to everyone. I loved every second. These are just some of the many reasons I’m grateful to Tupelo for the opportunity to write for thirty days. I heard faculty tell us to write immediately after graduation. Well, it worked.

On the two poems—In March 2017, I started taking pictures of my boring food and writing absurd and hyperbolic descriptions of them. We all found this funny, and soon the joke caught on. It brought people joy. That’s why I loved doing it. “Cook-Out on Tunnel Road” was based on my last Cook-Out visit with Jodie Free before graduating. The second, ” Dvīpa Sukhadhara,” is about Socotra Island, one of the most unique places on the planet. Over 33% of plant life, and a few strands of DNA, are found only on Socotra.

Cook-Out on Tunnel Road
Asheville, North Carolina

What I meant when I said hushpuppy
was this: oil-baked bread-crusted dinner donut,
half-dozen’d, splashed with shredded
leaf globe, or what you call home-made slaw.
Words were not enough—so I said, stuffed
in a styrofoam cup, cold cow tit cream,
brightly-iced powder cane, lactose whip,
polystyrene drink. I should’ve just said milkshake,
but I didn’t, and you said thinly-grated swine saucer
in red pepper paint—a barbecue pork plate—
or instead of onion rings you said ringed white
pungent-fruit fry-breaded, or when I tried
to say potato-sheaved fry double-dozen’d—
why the fuck didn’t I just say French fries?—
French fries aren’t French. In lapses of absence,
of presence, glades, hazes, ourselves sunk
by slight indulgence, dizzied beyond by words,
let’s just say filets of flightless bird,
twice salted, instead of chicken breast,
or just say wine instead of sulfide-derided
vine juice. Good things time-capsuled,
and we will mean it’s okay, it’s going to be okay.
I know another two dozen suns is a day.
I know it. It brings merciful, forgiving shade.

  for Jodie Free 

Dvīpa Sukhadhara
Socotra Archipelago

The clefts and caves in the steeper drops
to the water, somewhere once called very good,
a relief from the shades, some eternal
effect of self-knowledge, Socotra—word a brazen

arrow swiftly flung from Sanskrit, meaning,
island supporting bliss. The rhetoric of her waves,
the hills billow the down-cone tops of trees,
kindled roots in the air, pores opened for Thomas

the apostle, his finger jabbing at his side
to show the space between two ribs the centurion
pierced Christ. Thomas in tatters, waving a staff,
recalled his face-falling, crying, my savior

and my god! Once Thomas left, a stone hut
stood molten gray, barely holy. I think he left
not from failing faith, but from boredom.
You, however, only came at night, shifting

wisp of claw prints lizard-made, spaces opening
decades: yes, I heard you say, we are quite rare—
you’ll find these genetic lines made nowhere
else. Nothing else but silence. I wait for you, I said,

the fishermen, shepherds and vinedressers
building huts, docks, boats, homes, years and years
still going, still in longest being. On the brown
hills the trees loosened from the dirt and marched

louder than the sultan’s armies or the Portuguese,
and as the down-coned trees sunk into the sea,
leaving their holes, glowing embers in each sprung
to form like marionettes, and from them came

the bones of the dead redressed in skin, in hair,
with lips, with blank eyes. These reformed Socotrans
danced in the basins of unbundled churches,
waiting for the day’s catch, where I prayed you’d be,

tangled up with fish—your throat, mezzo, loosed
to liberating rage, to song and songs sung, of
this free, ageless thrust, glaze of sun dying off
its red haze, giving life, giving life, giving more

than the life I’m a fool to believe is my own
to waste. So—there you were, there kneeling
in the black dirt by the sea, the rocks wiped clean
of briny whitewater, singing to me, plant here

what no one from this time till then plants elsewhere.