Jesslyn Whittell
Summer 2025 | Poetry
The Stars Say
we’re in it now,
the wicked season
where comfort reveals less
about our actual desires
and more instead
of the curated balance,
its permanent ticking.
The formula for collapse
is not working properly,
the vision too fucking immaculate.
Because of AC restrictions
on the campus where I adjunct,
I teach georgics in a greenhouse
classroom, walk through
the baroque with my own
porousness on full display.
See I am not an ultimatum,
how could I be, blissed out
and increasingly flagrant
with my own predication
as I am? An email from payroll
asks for my star sign,
says they can pay my wages
as bags of earth or cups of water
but they need to know if I am
a fixed or mutable earner.
Cardinal in fact—all wings.
At 7:45 AM through a window
on the left side of the E train,
the particle count is so high
that the trees and houses
and power lines of the next 9 miles
quantize with shading.
I’m traveling to a city
where the distance is
measurable only in harm,
and when the doors close
someone offers to sell me a taser
it happens at some point
on most routes.
When they test the pulse,
it sounds like the automatic dealer
has reshuffled a thousand cards.
Jesslyn Whittell was born in Los Angeles and is still there. She is the author of the poetry chapbook "Slow Tapping to Help You Sleep [ASMR]" (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and her writing is published in or forthcoming from Georgia Review, Indiana Review, b l u s h, and Afternoon Visitor, among others. She teaches creative writing as a visiting professor and can be found on instagram @lofi__loaf.