for jess.
I started writing a poem at work today. The poem started with a title: “Keats Vs. Beats,” which referred to that night in
the year 2000 when four of us sat in a kitchen and had a read-off between John Keats and the beats(Kerouac, Ginsberg,
etc). It was the night of my roommate Jessica’s birthday. Her friend(my professor) John stashed a bottle of vodka in the
freezer, complete with cat toy wound around the neck. Belinda(my other roommate) pulled out the polaroid camera
and we took pictures for her in matching gray sweaters and fake mustaches. Jess came home balancing two plastic
champagne glasses with a finger’s width of liquid in each. She carried them all the way home from the opera house.
As soon as I started the piece, I realized how much I missed Jess, and I thought about emailing her again, as the last one
did not warrant a response. I figured I would try google, assuming a facebook page would surface(as everyone seems
to prefer that method nowadays). Instead, I found out that Jessica was murdered in her home in New Orleans.
I lost my breath upon reading and realizing the news, and I have yet to regain it. Jess was my first roommate, my first
real roommate after moving out of my dad’s house. I was 18 and she was 23, and she praised, nurtured, and supported
my poetry and desire to be a writer. She majored in British Literature and Botany, and loved Virginia Woolf. I’m aware
of Woolf’s existence because of her. She insisted I read “Orlando,” reasoning I would adore it. And I did. We watched
the movie together and Jess absolutely hated it. “They took out the most beautiful parts!” She yelled. That was her
way of talking. Kind of yelling, kind of not. If she loved something in a book, she would read it to you and want you to
love it just as much. She would finish the passage with, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
When I think of Jess, I think of sitting in the living room with her, smoking cloves and listening to Janis Joplin or Billie
Holiday. If Jess really liked a song, then she couldn’t let it play all the way through to the end. She would constantly
restart them from the beginning. I would pick through my e.e. cummings text while Jess sat in her giant chair, poetry
on one knee and the dictionary on the other. Some days we would drink boxed wine on our roof–I remember a spring
day doing that after class, unwinding, our books open against the tilt of shingles. At one point, I worked a waitressing
job that I could barely stand–one night after my shift I sat in the parking lot in the car and cried my eyes out. I put
myself together enough to drive home, and once I was there I let it spill again. Jess invited me to get a glass a wine and
come up to her room. She let me vent for a while, and then she played T.S. Eliot reading “The Wasteland.” We
spent the rest of the night laughing and losing our minds over Eliot’s cadence(“Hurry up pleeeease it’s tiiiiime”).
One time she made my friend who talked too much be completely silent for a solid five minutes. The same day we drank
boxes of wine and reclined on the roof in the sun topless, playing silly pop culture games and quoting lines of poems. It
was a very young and romantic time for me, an important one. Jessica and I kept in touch over the years here and
there–she moved to Utah for beekeeping and then to the Everglades, and to New Orleans which she loved. She stayed
there after Katrina, made a home for herself.
I can’t believe she’s gone, and I can’t believe I didn’t know–that I went on living without knowing. Which might sound
funny to read, but it’s just so strange when something tragic happens to a person who left such an imprint on your growth.
In a way I’m surprised that time didn’t stop. I can’t wrap my head around it. I can still see her sitting there, naming all
the plants in the plant room, or giggling about our next door neighbor Jo who walked around barefoot too much and sang
loud and unashamed on her balcony. Or bringing home giant stalks of cat nip and dropping it in the middle of the kitchen
floor so her cats could go to town. I think of receiving her emails and updates and how much I loved to read them, or the
card she sent after Katrina hit, the one where she is standing on the end of a boat placed squarely on the highway median.
I think of the day she plopped the H.D. biography into my lap, half-shouting “I love it!” Burning Bali Hai in hand.
There’s so much I want to say but it’s all coming out disjointed, in clumps and rushes and stops and starts. That will have
to do for now. I can’t get past the disbelief. I’ll end this with a poem that Jessica sent me a couple years ago:
Concerto no. 5
Again turn the sun to the music of the moon and let the night chime
Gather the fruits, let them bound the seams and burst the sorrows
Incessant swirls of melody and memory, thoughts of strands of pearls, vibrating another
clime
Baluster sways, breathing the songs of life, “days of youth” it cries,
yet solemnly creeks, “tomorrows”Once more the words become audible
“Wear it again, sing it again, taste it on my lips again, sweet Carmine”
Eyes and lips and sighs touched with a mistiness of age, molds the absolute, mirrors an
old accord
From time to time,
lovers resign“Chime again!” I plead the memories from indolence
Sorrows gather like moths to the dim light in the eyes of mine
Time incessantly breaks, laps the mind, searching for a source of abstinence
“Carmine, once…”
but the words fell away, and trailed apartCarmine, the sweet realness of that symphony is more than my memory can afford
Tomorrow’s baluster is steady and next to the nausea, numbness is fine
Accordion days and nights and these thoughts of mine
To that old song, I dance alone from time to time
I resign
–By: J.H.
