Jessie Askinazi
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Albedo
It Could Go Something Like This:
Doorframe unbloodied, rattles
with bright designs forever
can power a nation-state
without need to evolve, can be
dark cherry jelly in a fried sponge cake
A lesser-known sea
proud of its unconventional beauty
Everybody swims there.
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It Went Something Like This:
Woke up, blind
unable to locate a decibel that gels
No, I don’t have to adjust—
road markings on tarmac point
to something I never consented to.
Any remaining vertices lead to a stench
of happier children
prove chocolate and strawberries
ruin each other when combined, unclaimed
Baggage sold and repurposed
Shop/Lost/Treasures.
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It Won’t Go Something Like This:
Reinstating the road
after deer crashes through windshield
Armies of volunteers
nuke headlined men
While we Westerners laugh
from safe petting zoos
our thankless attitudes
overlook the moon
getting its light from the sun
(It doesn’t have its own light!)
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It Did Go Something Like This:
No one has ever said
“She’s too pretty”
about me
us girls who had nothing
but maybe the gap
between wanting and doing
We grew up to be those elderly women
in Japan
doing bad things
choosing jail
to spend our last days
with company.
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It Might Go Something Like This:
Who do you picture
when I say, “bad girl?”
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It Should Go Something Like This:
Our families, saying one sentence
at the same time
“Please do not feed the pigs.”
We reverse the reverse process of geomagnetic pulls
all of us fixed.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It Will Go Something Like This:
The only people I get along with
are those who overdo it.
I guess you should leave your continent
you’ve used up all the products on the shelf.
Any bacteria you pick up from kissing
can lead to tooth decay.
Jessie Askinazi is a New York City–based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Dream Pop Press—where she was nominated for both a Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize—Dreginald, Cruel Garters, and the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
She has recently performed readings at Hauser & Wirth and the Elizabeth Street Garden (in programs curated by Jesse Paris Smith), on behalf of Wonder Publishing’s Cool Memories workshop, and at Art Basel Miami. There, she read poetry during the Seeing Double performance, part of Clandestina’s Below the Surface exhibition.
A former writer-in-residence at The Betsy Hotel in Miami, Jessie published a commemorative book for the East Los Angeles Women’s Center’s 40th anniversary, featuring stories from 40 individuals she interviewed who were impacted by the organization.
She has led poetry and creative writing workshops at Locust Projects in Miami and at the Anglo-American University in Prague.