Two Poems by Jess Eagle

Joan

In March, Joan staged a photo of me
from behind a bar 
as if she was the tender.
I watched her spine 
curve in the mirror
behind bottles.

She thanked me in June:
Thank you for the cute
rock. She took the pebble 
and placed it on a high shelf 
in a tin dish.
They say there is always a cost
to fighting nature.

In August, I heard she
bit someone else’s 
chest like an apple.
If August had a hill,
I would have liked
to roll Joan back down it.
A timber load spilled

into the river in September,
and in October, Joan
invited me to sit at her table.
We viewed her photo of a man
clinging to a log jutting
from a wet bank.
I traced a blue vine down my teacup
to the first winter: our bare feet
in the soft grins of the
cold marble steps
where the stone caved.






California Tara

I lay diagonally across her bed
beside a gold flannel

she tossed there. My hand floats
toward it, patient river.

I want to clean her room. I listen
for the kettle. Her old sedan

in the garage six floors down. She splashes 
bronze into a glass and says yours.

I don’t drink, wish for a white
glove to drag across her dusty bureau,

the neighbor’s dog barks, a bone that
could fit inside me, her sharp stick of pink gum,

I remember how it feels to be new to
bussing tables, to be the bus tub. When it gets

dark, I crouch at the edge of her mattress.
I make eye contact with her cat just to practice.

Jess Eagle is a poet and social justice activist who lives in Oakland, CA. She has an MA in literature from Duquesne University, and her work has previously appeared in The Cortland Review and Lexicon.

26 January 2026