Jenny Drai

from THE HISTORY WORKER

Hearst Castle Lullaby II

swam 10 laps                                    toweled off

as drink bespoke a tremor in one hand

            dove lovely                 pike press into hilted

            air is wet wrung things

had eaten                   thus wiped a mouth

            counted 30 cement stairs

touched lime wash poured              etched as stone

who divides me         division

who devises        could be planes of light

                       sidling through low

            cushions of night

Jenny Drai has worked a lot of odd jobs and lived in a lot of different places, currently in Oxnard, California, where she resides so close to the ocean, she can hear sea lions bark while standing in her back yard. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, the Volta, Court Green, Handsome, Parthenon West Review, and Spork, among many other journals, as well as in the Calaveras chapbook series and in phrases / fragments: an anthology (Sustenance Press).   She has been named a finalist in the Sawtooth Prize from Ahsahta Press, the Subito Press Book Prize and the Open Book Competition from Omnidawn Press.  Her chapbook, “The New Sorrow is Less than the Old Sorrow,” is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.  The poem published here, “Hearst Castle Lullaby II,” is from a book-length project that attempts to intertwine an investigation into the complexity of human character with an American child’s slow-burgeoning understanding of European colonialism.