Three Poems by Jennifer Lemming

 

GIGiGi

 

All that shines is not gold 

I’ve learned as I’ve grown old 

The gilding on the nightlife  

is supreme but in the end  

what does it all mean.  

 

I met a man. I saw him  

playing music on the stage 

that memory of that moment 

for me, will not age.  

 

His instrument glittered, and glittered 

after hours when we relaxed after love 

laying among repercussions littered.  

 

I am not of this bright, noisy world 

But I love it so, and so, I swirled, 

also laughed among night’s sisters 

and brothers.   

I hang in those places with the others  

who walk in the brightest shadows 

who walk the road of iron2gold

 

 

 

 

Soft Sky 

 

Blue feathers falling from the sky, white-cloud  

tipped for a lighter flight. I pick one up with reverence  

and hold it up against the bluest blue, wondering  

where does the feather begin against a sky that does not end.

 

 

 

 

Star Slough 

 

I wish  

upon A…a star 

dispensing fire 

that would become 

…a diamond in 

my soul’s mine…a 

brightly shining 

colour sphere 

Incandescent 

inside me burning  

through space and time 

…a solidity and clarity  

cut out of the  

hardest material 

known to man  

should be rugged 

enough to live  

inside my mind.

Jennifer Lemming ’s blog about living in the Great Plains of the United States, A Page on the Plains is archived on the Hudson Valley Writers Guild site. She won Grand Prize for her poetry in the Dancing Poetry Contest in 2019. Her poems and short fiction have been published in online and print journals for the last several years to the present date. Her latest chapbook, Star Slough, was published by Dark Heart Press, March 2019. In 2023 North Dakota Humanities published her poem, BisBack Badlands in the Sense of Place issue.  She lives in Bismarck, North Dakota where she hands out her extra copies of the Poetry Magazine, usually in Tattoo parlours & beauty salons in Mandan and Bismarck North Dakota, respectively.