Jacquelyn Shah is Ephemera's April Poet

(4 Poems & More)

Welcome readers!

We’re happy to introduce Jacquelyn Shah, our selection for April’s Poetry at Ephemera. Thanks to Jacquelyn and everyone who submitted in February.

If you’d like to participate, we will be fielding submissions each month to publish one poem per issue from the same poet for the month. Each poet receives a $200 honorarium. For full rules and more info please see our designated post about Poetry at Ephemera. You can also submit via the button:

---

Introducing, Jacquelyn Shah!

Writer Bio

Jacquelyn “Jacsun” Shah, nonbinary-ish, feminist, iconoclast, atheist: AB, MA, MFA, PHD––English/creative writing. Her publications include: poetry chapbook, small fry; full-length poetry book, What to Do with Red; journal poems; hybrid-memoir Limited Engagement: A Way of Living (a Choeofpleirn Press non-fiction book contest winner, 2023). She is a Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee. Born in Cincinnati, she’s a long-time resident of Houston, TX. Almost every day she writes for hours and hours, often in a Houston coffeehouse or tea shop, or at home where her calico cat Zadie sits beside her.

---

Artist Statement

Most recently enamored of the cento (Italian for “patchwork”), I have now written 468 poems in the form, using lines from 3,495 different poets. It seems a natural evolution in my writing journey since I own, probably, over 2,000 poetry books, so there is no dearth of material at my fingertips.

I’ve devised rules for my particular cento-fashioning:

◆ The cento must always make grammatical sense, though I’m more casual about any other sense-making, since I sometimes work with surrealist and nonsense poetry.

◆ The cento can have certain alterations of a poet’s lines––mainly: tense, person, number, article, preposition.

◆ The cento can occasionally include partial, instead of full, lines; or it can employ two lines if that works more efficiently.

My process: I take a book from its shelf, thumb through it, find a line to my liking, and begin to search for lines that will follow in some way, thus beginning to build the poem. Along the way, I might change the order of lines or eliminate one, add one, spending anywhere from three to seven hours or more until conclusion.

As someone who cannot commit to one way of being, or writing, I love poetry as a genre because it is so open to variation. But even as I wrote my now-published “memoir,” I couldn’t abandon my tendency to vary the “narrative” of it, including poems, lists, quotes, pieces of letters, complaints, historical tidbits. It truly became a hybrid work. So I suppose I can be termed a “hybridist.”

---

Poems

Each issue of Ephemera spanning April will feature one poem from Jacquelyn. After each issue drops, the poem from that issue will then appear here as well. In this case, we’re launching part of Jacquelyn’s first poem below as a preview before the full issue comes out. This post will remain on our Substack, free to view, for the year. We hope you’ll enjoy these poems and revisit Jacquelyn’s page from time to time.

Poem 1 of 4

Drinking Song of a Pen Collector

I drink ink
take it drop by drop
and feed it to pages 
on pages of words upon words
by delivery of pens

I drink ink
nothing tastes so good
nothing gives me color
like a swig of Meadow Green
Magenta Flash   Purple Mojo
Nightshade

I drink inks
mix their hues
with all the teeming colors
roiling in my brain
and when red dominates
I cool it down 
with a scrawl or two
of Lake Placid Blue

I drink ink
daily  nightly  yearly 
will drink into the forever
of squall and squalor
invasion  evasion

I drink ink––
’cause nothing keeps me as sane
in the aftermath of news

And only drinking ink
while thinking and penning 
can revolutionize the many 
too-white cranks 
and blanks of paper

Appears in April.1 of Ephemera

If you’ve made it this far, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at the monthly or yearly level. We offer perks to our subscribers and are looking to add more as time goes on. We’re recently reached an important milestone, 120 subscribers, which is fantastic and a testament to the generosity of the creative community, and yet in order to reach sustainability, in essence, for us to carry on, we need to reach the 200 subscriber threshold and beyond. Dare we dream that this little weekly can be sustaining? We’ll still have to keep our jobs and side gigs and hustles, but maybe if we hit 200 we’ll be able to work a little less on those and more on Ephemera and on literature and supporting creatives. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to consider becoming a paid member, we humbly ask you to consider the $5/month to start and if you like us and the offerings, at some point think about the yearly. Many thanks and much love.

Poem 2 of 4

Did I?

Like a viper born from the blond force of a dazzling splendor	
I learned to live in a kiss,						
pretending to be a vegetable tongue, nearly alive.			
The only language I recognize is my own.				

To keep the sky free of luxurious shapes,				
the moon and Jupiter hang near each other				
while panty-clad gods enjoy						
shattering a day into tiny pieces.					

Blood fingers went marble,						
sparkling on the hand that utters nothing but blue		        
rearrangements of a desiccated sky,					
for spite. And not wanting					          

my pen scratching at the heart of life,					
I chew matches of madness and old					
moldy membranes of useless questions––			        
blue warbler says chewchewchewchewchewww . . .		        

I defend myself with this look				     
of nonsense, grim grin of knowing.				
Dressed in seaweed, gold, and fishscales,				
did I hold you in and repel all else?			



Cento––lines, in order of appearance, from:
Aimé Césaire, Braulio Arenas, Vicente Aleixandre, Jen Karetnick, William Meredith,
V. P. Loggins, Alex Lemon, Octavio Paz, Alissa Quart, Marianne van Hirtum,
Rachael Allen, W. S. Graham, Antonin Artaud, Miguel Labordeta, José Maria Hinojosa,
D. A. Powell, Federico García Lorca, Harry Roskolenko, J. V. Foix, Karen Leona Anderson

Failed to render LaTeX expression — no expression found

Appears in issue April.2 of Ephemera

Poem 3 of 4

Crazy Like a Koan

Are you crazy? he asked me.
First the poems, then the stones,
yoga, zen, and now tarot?

(The cards had come, unpredictably,
into my hands. What could I do?)

They’re just poems, after all,
I told him, and the stones,
just stones, after all.

And yoga, ...

Appears in issue April.3 of Ephemera

Poem 4 of 4

Confession / Conclusion

Appears in issue April.4 of Ephemera