THANK YOU: Poems

A chapbook by Jake Fournier

Featuring illustrations by Gena Salorino

THE HATCHERY

It's the people resting in the yellow grass
like huge pomelos rotting by the fish hatchery,
the U-Haul army on the horizon
threatening to pack them all away in boxes.
Andrew Weatherhead sits downstream
on the beach wood where Dottie
caught the largest muskie I have ever seen
and shaved the flakes of its prismed scales
into the glass cup of her kaleidoscope.
In the eyepiece: a pinwheel, which, twisted,
reveals a soviet dirigible with octagon motors,
the events of the past week of my life,
and Dottie shouting in a bar somewhere
in my future, with feeling. At a bar somewhere
to burn in the fire of General Sherman’s
Tecumseh-haunted eyes, as the U-Haul,
a box on wheels, burns its gasoline fires
past emerald shards that wedged their way
into the muskie’s flesh—because we are still
looking in the eyepiece, and the scales cling
like wet tobacco on the fingers of the lovers
in the ruby box tinged with Cornelia-yellow.
I’m sorry,
the countless lovers having sex in the countless boxes
stacked near the hatchery at the box depot.
It is a convenient time to look away,
to look to the afternoon, hexagonal, hovering
around the six-sided dais. The afternoon
that clutches the remaining hand of the evening
with a missing arm. As these two dance,
the days repeat, twisting gently about the weathervane
which, on the farm and in my dream, is an arrow
with a bass’s mouth and a fish’s tail
made of the finest Strom Thurmond steel
but rusted so that its hinge reveals
the hidden names of the Norse gods in the weekdays
to the ears of the farm dogs. So say Woden,
thunder. Say Thor. I’m sorry, but there’s a pleasure
in just saying things against the backdrop
of the muffled rain, in just saying things
imprecisely because you know what I mean.
It all happened to us this week
while we were sleeping, but being awake now
in the black leather chair, the green mug
flecked with umber in my remaining hand
and the earl gray cylinder on the coffee table,
is much better. Being awake is wonderful,
at first especially, because sleep is death.

THANK YOU

I want you to feel
like you’ve been lying
too long in the sun

or like you’ve been dreaming

a lot lately without remembering any.

Your arms have been sleeping 

in my arms when you worry.
They settle in and they tell me
how you worry
about holidays.









Dan, I am catching a pigeon
with my bare hands and releasing it
from your roof to commemorate this.
The wind in my face means
I am making it in this world.
Dan, if this is the only world
then you are my only friend
and the river is the only wind.
No blood but the wind flowing
through my body, which is the river.
Take the stethoscope and listen.
My heart thumps Biz Marki’s
“Just a Friend.” Listen. It’s bourbon.
It’s a Corona humming in the fridge.
It’s the sound of us making it in this world.
It’s this world. Can you hear the river
rising over the bridge?









I am riding in the car
with Mary and Sam.
I rub Sam’s shoulders
so it’s less weird
that I rubbed Mary’s.
When he touches my hand
I realize that he loves me.

We were high and thinking
we could check into
a pay-by-the-hour hotel.
The white ribbon we saw
through the black sky rising
was a telephone wire
in a station wagon’s high beams.

Someone in suspenders is explaining the edelweiss.
When you are in a field of edelweiss
all it does is cover your body.
Louise calls me to say something
but all it means is no more Novemberfest,
and that I won’t be staying in the guest bed
any time soon. In an apartment filled
with hands most will just hang there
but Louise’s will run through your hair
sooner or later, making me wish I were
a girl. Louise, you’re something special.
You’re like when you’re a kid
and you can just sit there at midnight
watching the Champagne bubble.









“Curly” Kristen Louise! Florence Margarite!
If you can’t chastise a girl with her name
then you failed to name her properly, my sisters.
In the playroom, assume the impenetrable defense:
roll on your back with your legs piston-kicking.
(Innocent laughter. Innocent hateful screaming.)









After a week of not existing
I wither here a lonely mess
of wood wearing roller skates
like it’s 1995. It’s how I get
around to things as they once were
and so not again but for the first time
everything is happening!
We are two people on one bicycle
and you are doing anything you can
think to do for me—lifting your arms,
easing the weight, laughing
when I respond to passersby
that I am six feet five inches tall
or at a red light when someone says
it’s so beautiful: thank you.

Horsechestnut trees
with palmate leaves.
We had three in the front yard.
That is the hard thing,
when there used to be a tree.
Carpet where there was no carpeting.
You can’t remember how things were
only that they used to be.
We would plant the horsechestnuts.
None took root, like peach pits.
It seems there is a secret we should know about,
some hidden impetus for growth.









As the ocean accepts a carcass
ballasted with cinderblocks, my friends
will believe I am expressing myself.
My gratitude, friends of mutual indebtedness,
is the unacceptable work of thoughts
I have conveyed hitherto with confidence and grace;
I cannot go on in this way.
Bonnie is mixing up another gin and tonic
with the odds that I will end up asleep
on the futon long before the other guests
are one and the same. Listen everybody,
I say raising my glass to the ceiling fans,
now that I have your attention
I am going far away…









I want you to feel my love like a bed.
A bed can be a mossy place or pile of hay.
A bed can also be like the bed in [...] what’s that movie?
with the au pair? and the special knob that lets the children
travel through different realms of the universe?
I am speaking, I think, partially of dreams.
I am speaking from bed, before sleep.
Can you hear in the background that gentle rain?
I am lying down, and I am safe.

THE REVERSER

The pressure of the washerwoman’s arms
in a V as she applies the tourniquet
(her cheeks all rosy) and her hands
remarkable in being so slender
and small cannot stop the bleeding.
Reading the letters of the ambulance
spelled backwards convinces us:
in the Garden of the Broken Pitcher
something terrible has happened to the stonemason.
Like a crease on the surface of a puddle
meeting the white rim of foam, miraculously
a line of swallows comes to rest near us.
Geoff, the cardinals whisper, do you see
the bluebird perched on the washerwoman’s ear
like a killdeer on its nest of pebbles?
Like a snowcrab crawling on a copper shell?
The rust along his throat and belly
bleeds into her auburn hair. Geoff,
they whisper because they are not to be trusted.
My summer job at the estuary taught me
that colored birds have a confederacy.
Too tired to migrate, they are seceding
and the water fowl are choosing new directions
for their travels. As if responding
two flocks of geese crisscross overhead;
the Canticle of Early Morning ends.
In a burst of dappled feathers, the sparrows
come unwound when you touch the handle
of the reverser—an imaginary lever
that rewinds the sun below the housetops.
Everything is slowing down.
The fountain’s jet is just a trickle
until ten-thousand beads rise from the fountain water
and are sucked into the Cherub’s mouth.
The saboteur ascends the trellis looking toward the ground.
Streams of blood on the walkway
slither back into the workman’s body.
As the mortar gathers to his trowel,
as the laundress unpins the wettest linens
and sets her basket in the shade,
he acts like nothing happened for awhile
then, walking backward from the wall, he joins her.
She is smiling. Her blue dress climbs her sides
like Morning Glory seen crawling up a lattice
with a time-lapse camera.
She slides off her underwear and runs to hide them.
From the crook of the Sycamore half-obscured
by the crabapple, I lower you down.
Outside the garden I say, Julie, go to sleep.
We can pretend it never happened.