The sum of peeps and chirps and howls,
Quacks and honks and mews and moos,
Grunts and whinnies and snorts and chortles
And every other sound the animals make
Can be translated to just two things:
"Mother," and "straight."
One is a cry for food and protection,
The other, a prayer to know the fastest, safest way to their daily destiny.

-jenn

Locust are subject to plagues of their own.
Hordes of them lie dead in the street, or dying.
Instead of the sky, they've pressed their buzzing wings to the road,
Upside down, on their backs.

Maybe an invisible angel of death
Came and leafed through them.
Maybe it just picked out the first hatched.
Maybe it carefully took one of every ten,
Carefully moving the decimal point over each time
On the way to the tally of decimation.

It makes me wonder what unique trait
The firstborn have to make them
Such easy prey for premature pickins.
Is it that they are more pressured to be perfect,
Or that they see a world of adults
Before other children are born,
And the confusion of what to be--
Grown or childlike, makes them resort
To extreme measures, while earthly pressures
Make them quite willing to take the bait?
Or maybe it's something we just can't see,
Something pure and innocent and weak
Lying around in their junk DNA?

-jenn

Meet me down by the mailbox.
Someone else has made the bed.
There's a mud puddle there
So you can wash your head and face,
Flutter your wings,
Get the sand and water in between
All the little places where your feathers connect.
Then maybe we can get a little sleep,
Get a good start, begin again
In the morning.
We'll bound up out of our mattresses twin,
Just like Ricky and Lucy Robin
Or Dick van Dyck and Mary Tyler Moore.

-jenn

The burro lays down in the shade by the fence.
His narrow eyes evade expression.
Maybe his mind winds along a trail from another time.
No one can know.
No one can say what he would do
If that fence had never been built.

-jenn

I cook breakfast on a faulty burner.
I have three others that work just fine,
But I think the bacon cooks better
Slower.
Lunch can cook on a normal fast one.
Supper is stewing in the crock pot.
But my son and I are thankful for my faulty burner
And the delicious, "most important meals of the day" it cooks.

-jenn

Is it bad that you judge me
When you don't know anything about me?
Is it worse that, after so long,
You don't know anything
About yourself?
Take a breath and return to your own heart.
See how it looks in there.
Then, see if you still have any words
To waste on me.

-jenn

When the waves had churned me up
And away from the present company excluded,
When the big waves washed me up
On the shore with the other trash,
A lone beach comber came along
And saw something shiny,
Saw something worth collecting in me,
Brought me to a nice shelf in a nice home over the hearth.
The waves had polished me.

-jenn