Rooftop Poetry Club - Jennifer Campbell

Jennifer Campbell

Bio:
Jennifer Campbell received a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from Buffalo State and is currently an English Professor at Erie Community College North.

Her poetry has been published in Earth's Daughters, A Hudson View Poetry Digest, Skyline Magazine, The Buffalo News, and Artvoice. Her work has also been featured on www.PoetExpress.com and www.poetz.com. In 2006, she won second place in ByLine Magazine's "New Talent Poetry Contest" and received an honorable mention in Skyline Magazine's "Winter Poetry Contest."

Poems:

New Resolution

The effect of an optical instrument in making separate parts of an object distinguishable by the eye.
-- Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

The sky is not large enough.

I can block it out with big, dark

glasses. My vision improves as

years pass-I begin to see choices

through the silt of falling expectations.

When the time comes for bifocals,

I will understand my double-lives,

one close and patient, the other

hollowed by pale, floating decisions.

I bet the atmosphere hovered

protectively over my grandmother

when she died, long before eyes

could think about failing her,

mere months after I put to work

my newborn eyes.

Drowning

Seneca Lake sleeps,
a glossy, unruffled sheet
as one lane winds by
on its right, when-
I see the primeval
wooden claw surging up
from the water's surface.

A giant tree felled
by the invisible bullying
of time, or a god's hand?

It stalls the car, scoops out
a damaged heart, appetite,
a time when I lost myself
in a man's shadow
until my will slunk in
toward the ribcage and, now,
my wasted body falters.

Seaweed slides between toes,
pulling me down,
water seals my absence
and I learn the bliss
of forgetting.

Poised, a return to quiet,
uncharacteristically warm water
beckons, only there is no tree
and the road has been
impassable for weeks.

Showering in the Dark

Once sleep swirls itself
down the drain, the release begins.
Tight curls unfurl with new ideas
down to the lower back. Everything
softens, the bar of soap becomes
a foamy wand, molting skin
falls away, rounds of cocoa and walnut
shells having sloughed off a day's damage.
All silken curves, a return to tenderness.

She often leaves the house with long
hairs on her knees, nicks behind
ankles, but her private blackouts
provide a necessary collection
of concentrations to start the day.

No longer erotic, as an old
woman the showers serve
as a fact-finding mission:
with an archeologist's interest
she burrows through soap-catching
hills and narrow valleys, then
gently prods tissue from breast
to underarm. She traces slight
depressions from surgeries, now
melting translucent scars. Tenderness
pushes back as she kneads her hips.

After decades of experiments,
there is still something to be said
for flipping off the easy judgment
of sight, and she continues to learn
how beauty feels when water pools
in her eyelashes, becomes trapped
in the webs of her hands, binds her
to the lover who has entered the room.

The Effects of Students on Language

It begins with a desire for more time alone,
an inability to respond well in social situations.

My mind slips ahead to the next drink,
relieving my pen, dipped in the murderous red well.

Others are defiantly effected by her addiction.
Loved ones do feel cutting jealousy when chores

are ignored, birthday cards forgotten.
At this stage a person can slip into a comma.

If only this were true, I wouldn't waste time
searching for the right pauses. I'd write myself

into darkness, free of cotton-mouthed excuses.
Friends wouldn't try seducing me with other

pastimes, could cancel the intervention.
There would be no need for the work sighted.