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Best Poems Written by Jennifer Brooks

Below are the all-time best Jennifer Brooks poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

These Ribbons I Tie As You Leave

Blue – 
for your arm wrapped around
my clavicle. I thought
I would loose my breath.

Red – 
for the cusp of our hip bones
struggling to pull the drunken color
from our orange cheeks.
and our sweat, our sweat, our sweat
evaporating 
in the drenched summer air.
Our pants futile afterthoughts
Left crumpled on the floor
It is here I asked for your respect
And you filled me with it.


Orange – 
for the musk smell of our blanket den. I would watch the way dawn light
speckled your shoulders, pale, white-blue
Iridium. 
I would trace the ink
of your skin, fingertip hovering a half inch
from your bone. 

Green – 
for how my name would hesitate
on your breath in brief puffs 
like dandelion seeds blown from 
My wistful lips when I was 
eleven 
waiting for them to bring back my wish.

Black – 
for my sleeveless dress, as we strolled from 
your father’s funeral.  

It was the only time I watched you cry.

There were little holes in the cement sidewalk.
They filled with rain, oil
And your tears.
I watched your face change through 
their watery colored reflections.


Pink – 
for the way your skin repels from my 
Touch, quivers as though my finger- 
print were a red hot poker.
You haven’t allowed me to touch you
In a year.

Purple – 
for the color of her font, as she responds to you. It is an eager
Color. She responds with all the passion of an Eskimo kiss. 

You left her waitng..always.

I have been special to you,
she replies to your
overtures.

Her letters 
Who blush
like a maid
Who’s felt the hot moist
whisper of something naughty
tickle against her ear lobe.

White – 
for the way your eyes punch accusations
sharper then your razor tongue.

They spit 
blue crackled lightening,
like an angry alley cat.

My words cannot reach you here.
You will leave.

We will divide our booty

Words that once held my name like a piece
Of carefully folded origami
now hiss cold 
devoid like the plaster of our empty room.

Grey- 
for the morning 
now knocking on my window.

I am livid in my withdrawal, tossing and turning
I can find no comfort
in
the tangle of these vacant sheets.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

The House Eaters

1.
My grapefruit tanned
toothpicks
bow above
the five-day flattened
spot
in an olive shag carpet
tracing grandpa Leo's 
blueprint,
with one encapsulated
toe –
this is the femur, this is
the head,
this is the fist, the ring
finger, the soul.
I search for any blunt
white quivering slivers
of Caroline's purported
fly fetuses.

2.
Huddling behind the
corpse
of an old hospital bed,
a framed photo 
smoke browned and
wearing my toddler face,
watches
his children choke
hushed, broken
sentences

this will be yours, my
plate, separate the
holiday china…

an enigmatic language
that hovers in
smoke stretched rings
to wilt
upon the hallway
bulb.

3.
I am left
the ceramic cygnet,
and an ivory carved 
dromedary.

These artifacts
plucked
from his porcelain
menagerie
that I decipher 
through dust fingerprints
for
one small inheritance of
a memory.

4.
Tomorrow,
Aunt Rose
puts price
to his bibelots,
the olive shag carpet,
even cousin Amy's 
plastic horse,
who was accidentally
left to pasture on an 
afghan.

A silver plated glass cage
image of her past,

she says she will whittle
all of him,
from the
wooden
house 
bones.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Mom's Attempt At the Garden of Eden

1.
Mom 
kept the  perch 
we caught in a bucket.

And when we took them home
She would clean and place them
In our twenty gallon tank
Where they bobbed in stunned silence
Eyes watching for any white movement.

Nobody cared
when they committed fishicide 
on their domesticated tank-mates.

Even the little beta fish
Who had survived our six day pilgrimage from Florida, to find Mecca
was a cool whip container.

2.
Whenever we had guests for dinner,

Mom swooned they
were the smartest fish she had ever seen.

She bestowed upon them names - Jed and Lucy
tapping at the glass 
with one extended finger,
feeding them fish flakes,
like  porpoises fed from the teeth of a trainer in Ocean World

“You can’t keep perch in a fish tank”
the guests would say,
but
they lived for two years
bobbing and staring
in the vacant tank space.

 3.
One crisp winter morning
Jed finished his breakfast of gold fish flakes,  took one
last gulp of slimy tank
water 
then hurled
himself off of glass
walls.
It went 
over and over, 
so hard
I almost thought
the glass would crack.

4.
Lucy 
sat quietly and watched 
him.

She too died a few days later
like aged soulmates
who often cease
to be after their amor
dies.

When someone left the lid open, 
she plunged
her blue green skin shimmered
as she laid 
making fish O’s in the dry air..

I often wonder
if the air that morning
smelled
like an ice floe
to a better place
somewhere Jed waited
with our beta and our angel fish
a place of worms, kelp 
and dragonflies.

4.
Mom 
emptied the tank of the murky filtered water.

Rinsed the ultra neon yellow fish gravel,
and placed the fake plants on a sponge.
Separating  air filter, from pump 
from clear plastic tubing
and put to rest
in a brown cardboard box..

She did it without a word.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Lizard Hunting

I. 
In the orange land, 
the sidewalks race wild with them, 
postured like statues of royal gardens 
the marble lions 
amongst hibiscus limbs. 

II. 
I like the smell of them, 
earth warmed dirt 
and fallen honeysuckle 
baked 
beneath the Florida sun. 

III. 
I poke with 
one tanned fingertip 
where the flesh 
cocoons around their 
soft belly, 
it is like 
the open sesame 
for lizards. 

IV. 
The open mouth of a lizard 
has no bias 
it dangles on ear lobes 
like Coco Chanel 
classic in style. 

V. 
When separated 
the tail becomes an asp 
wrestling with the truth 
of it's loss.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Hunger

Here, 
where the black white shadows 
pond and melt 
her dress 
flutters around the 
pronounced scimitar 
of her neck line. 

Eyes whisper 
fr-ig-id 
with a syllabically thick accent 
as if cold were a ham-fisted lug 
emerging from the 
yawning dark mouth 
of the cabin behind her 
pressing his hands 
with the grip 
of a dying man 
bracing his last breath 
with each 
light blue, 
half moon 
fingernail.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Kindergarten

Mrs. Fallicker 
    a Gurnsey dairy cow 
chewing her gum cud, 
    laughing 
moo laughs 
    about Bobbi 
the first child in our class 
    to eat paste. 

I walk amongst them 
    with my eager thoughts 
tracing J's in dust jackets 
     with my pinky finger 
eating letters, 
     A's like dry cheerios. 

The gloss 
     of library book pages 
thick with the musky smell of 
     forest floor 
               moss. 

This school is foreign.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Long Distance

Jamie decides today will be the day 
we take off to Kansas. 
We've both dreamt of it, 
driving off to flat lands 
where we would be swept off, 
cackling, 
on our brooms to Oz. 

I laugh,
an unfunny laugh.
Chipped and cracked,
it tumbles
across the phone line. 

She laughs too,
an unfunny laugh,
and I stare at the phone 
my eyes shaking, 
clutching my life force 
of Camel Jade cigarettes. 
Dreaming suddenly of the Petroleum bridge 
because it is so black today 
and how I want to walk across 
in my addled bare feet 
like I did when we were seventeen 
and find her 
at end, 
long hair sardonically twirled around her
pinky finger
in the tattered red
sun stained flannel,
and her purple converse
tennis shoes.

She remarks 
that we wouldn't be able to reach off the 
ground anyway, 
as old and wide as we have gotten 
and that 
menthol cigarettes wouldn't 
probably be popular with 
midgets. 
And I agree with her, 
and laugh, 
and cry, 
and wonder 
what silver cylindrical dreams use 
when they move away 
a slow sail down the Allegheny 
a broken down old U-haul 
or perhaps, 
.........brooms and twisters 
farther than Kansas, farther than Oz.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Bessie

My comrade - 
was 
a candy apple red steed. 

I would admire 
the way the sun 
would catch and sparkle 
across her bars, 
marvel over 
the grand Ferris wheel 
in proportion 
to her two small children. 

Some days 
we would don 
the sound 
of my sea foam flip flops, 
galloping, 
I would let 
the rough cement 
guide us 
as 
I rode 
on, 
a mad train west.

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Colin, During the Dark Ages.

My brother
could hibernate through 
anything.

Even the nights of unmitigated fury
that expelled itself in blasts of white, frothy 
spittle 
from the corners of father’s lips.

He was a cocooned worm nestled 
in the bed at the back of my room
while
mom held the cheap aluminum door,
maintaining our homeostasis,
shut.

On the other side
my father, a wounded creature 

Hissing, crackling, 
Insane.

would bang 
until the vibrations shook my very breath.

Colin 
never really understood 
being fourteen 
and 
scrubbing out the night’s fury 
that stained the carpet
in crimson ponds.

The smell of a bucket 
of warm pink soapy water
and the
red that never really washed out

He would not understand the game
I made of it
blood spot, ink blot test

	This one looked like a butterfly,
And this  one A father and daughter, 
	And this one a bottle of pills.

This boy who brought home
matted and framed pictures from kindergarten

	Crayon colored pleasant family, 
	crayon colored pleasant home

Details | Jennifer Brooks Poem

Writers Envy

I get jealous 
over prose 
who possess the room through her lips 
phonetic, 
white lightening, 
kissing the air with their intonations, 
evoking 
my frontal lobe 
with alliteration and rhythm 
the shoes 
upon which to stomp 
my feet, my feet, my feet 
aloft 
this stomping ground 
in my head 
where I hunt the mush valleys 
for 
a single 
lotus blossom 
of inspiration. 

If  I could covet 
this poet's thoughts 
her words, her tone, her imagery, 
my poetry beast 
would awaken 
and shake his mane 
roaring. 

Instead 
I sit spellbound, 
listening to her vowels and consonants 
fall on the roof 
of this auditorium like rain pings 
on aluminum, 
wondering 
when her thoughts end 
and mine begin.