Two by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn | Amsterdam Review

Red Bead: Stupid Bucket

Spring makes my arms itch. I‘ll sleep after I put a few words on paper, I call up from the basement. When I was young, this was my favorite season, full stop. Goose flesh & wet metal. Bulbs wrecking their paper underground. Now annoyance enters the calculus. Do you work with paper, the doctor asks. I say yes as she walks me through how bleaching chemicals may irritate skin. Mystery unsolved; my paper is unreal & cannot hurt me. My daughter asks my favorite character in her favorite movie. The calm, neutral monster is the correct answer, but I say it is the bucket. Stupid bucket, the pigtailed girl calls it, stupid because it has a hole in the bottom. A holey bucket has no function. It becomes something else, a way of seeing. There is no movie without the monster, but there is no seeing without the break. Imagine a trip to the well, dull & complete. No access. No portal. Who needs paper-- when the girl needs to write, she scratches her feelings into corn.

Red Bead: Interiors

Don’t make me name the film. All I’ll say: interiors this red can’t exist in the world. It rains so much & the number of alcoves for sheltering in exists in direct proportion to the number of secrets & volume of rain. In the final scene, the man speaks the unsayable into a vacancy in a temple wall. A vacancy? Fuck it; a hole, & how desperately the man traces a single finger on its edge before he can even begin to speak. Of the wall, the hole, the hand, the mouth, the clean, sharp part of the man’s hair, the shadow, the orange light, the dust, the infinite & tender quiet-- it is the secret itself that most asserts its thingness. So volatile, so newly real it must be sealed in the wall with a grassy palmful of dirt. To be a safe house for secrets was the high architecture of romance, I believed. I, oh no, might. The having of secrets, the holding. How I held fast to them as though they were glowing coals. As though the rest of the city was made of paper. The rest of its people. The never resting. It never rained. How they hurt to hold.

Photo by Samm Smith

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the author of the full-length collection Girl in a Bear Suit (Elixir Press, 2024) and the e-chapbook Disambiguation (Salamander/Suffolk University, 2024). She’s the winner of the Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Recent work has appeared in or is coming soon from swamp pink, Villain Era, The Common, & On the Seawall. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and serves as the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. More at https://www.jenjabailyblackburn.com.