Kaleidoscope

Bloated, bloodshot eyes etch into the asphalt, and she tastes the grain, the tar sticking to her lids, pinching them back until the block becomes a terrarium broken open, bludgeoned until the onlookers become a piercing, inescapable screech, a skidding halt, exhaust rushing up her nose,

and in that exhaust is a moment before, a stepping into the street, Frank Ocean on her headphones that makes her think of a fishing town, of her girlfriend visiting there for the summer, of that girlfriend sitting in a luxury apartment, of their assumed mutual affection, of the effect capital takes on intimacy, of how a moving together can tear apart,

and in that there is girlhood, the clenching of muscle, a blue, crooning net of veins creeping like improvised dissonance tamed by a needle, by a pill, by a patch, by the hope that her voice will turn bright and buoyant all on its own, that ease will arrive like a swiftly tilting sedan, careen into her flesh, fuse chest with headlights, heart with dashboard, breath with air filter,

and in that filter is a stale inhaler, the bitter blanketing of mist across the back of her tongue, awakening on a playing field, feeling the hand of her purple-faced father on her back, of murmuring made in perspiration, of him seeing his brother’s face in hers, of his brother’s brains spilling into his own eyes, of that abandoned boyhood, of her boyhood, of his girlhood, of intersections, of cross walks, of walking with a cross on her back, the stench of martyrdom, and a lover who will look at

her long enough to meet the multiplicity in her gaze,

and in that gaze there is the car, and there is the road, and there is the stranger rushing toward her with a coral wash cloth, and there is the blotting of blood, and there is the bliss of being cared for, and there is the wish to crash all over again.

Rose Jenny is a trans writer based in Tennessee. Her poetry chapbook, My Apocrypha, is available through Bottlecap Press. She is the recipient of the 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize from Gasher Press. Rose has also been published in SWWIM, Oroboro, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her writing has received additional support from Tin House and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Rose earned her MFA in Creative Writing from University of Miami.