Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory is a kalideoscope of a girl. A hybrid cross between lover, fighter, activist, caffeine-junkie, journalist, hippie, poet, and human, she empties her head by trapping dreams in words and passing them off as poetry. If you are reading this, then chances are, she's proven to be successful in the endeavor. A 2009 member of the NJ Youth Poetry SLAM Team & the Brave New Voices Green Team, founding member of the Spitting Images Poetry Slam team at New Jersey City University, past contributor to the online literary magazine Troubadour 21, and President of WPL (Writing Performance Laboratory), Jennifer (a.k.a. Phoenix) is ready and willing to put her heart on the line if it makes you feel happier in your own skin. www.phoenixpoet.info.
Four Poems (September 20, 2011. Issue 31.)
The Alchemist (for Le Van)
"For the past five years, Le Van from Vietnam has slept next to his wife…his dead wife. After she died in 2003, he missed her so much, he would sleep on her grave site. A year later, he dug a tunnel next to the grave so he could sleep beside her."- from "Man Slept Next To His Dead Wife for Five Years," Ripley's Believe It or Not Blog, 12/3/09
They say that Edgar Cayce
absorbed his knowledge
by sleeping on top of books
that their words penetrated his skin's cellular membranes
and found a home in the coils of their DNA
becoming one with electrolytes and predetermination
so every time he went to sleep on command
in an attempt to wrangle the universe
into answering someone's impossible questions,
the quarks intermingled with ancient knowledge
until it resurrected
in the form of a man
with too few explanations for the too many answers
that hung from his tongue at any given moment.
When my father
would tell stories about the war,
he'd always underscore
that a man was only as good as his words.
and in the case of his countrymen,
only meant always
so I read books like memorial services
and memorized poems
like they would raise the dead-
nothing like a God complex
to make a little boy fall in awe of literature.
When I met you,
the words weren't enough anymore.
I became a connoisseur of body language.
You were my favorite novel.
When I lay on top of you,
the world came to life again.
The birds sang in key
and our children revised all of
our foolish mistakes out of the draft.
They were the best editors,
we, alchemists of universe and skin
so, when you died,
I didn't know what else to do.
The leaves were losing color
our fathers faded into myth
the world turned into a library
filled with dust and decomposition reactions.
This was never meant to be forever.
I just wanted to sleep on you
long enough
to bring you back.
Gravity
"22 year old Li-Wan who was still wearing her wedding dress, jumped from a window ledge 80 feet high hours after her fiance called off the wedding. Amazingly enough, a local care worker Guo Zhongfan managed to catch her held her by the neck to keep her from plummeting to her doom."\
- from "Man Catches Jilted Bride," Ripley's Believe It or Not Blog, 5.19.11
The first thing you learn in physics
is that gravity travels at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared.
This is decidedly not what you tell a girl
with a weakness for impossible romance and speed
but the professor she was about to promise her next century to
believed in full disclosure.
After all, who wants to marry a man
only to find out that there's someone faster
and prettier with the potential to change the world
waiting in the wings?
She'd had her inklings
had seen his thoughts float out of the windows
and into the distance of the cliffs
wrapped in urban legend and sky-eating trees,
watched as he shifted hotel reservations
to the highest altitude to which managers
would concede
despite their modest budget.
He said it was for the sunlight.
She knew better.
They almost made it to the wedding day
until he told her the venue would be a surprise.
Always taken with the fingerprint the sunrise made
on rural shores, she assumed they'd exchange rings
by the sea.
When her blindfold was released,
they'd reached a configuration
of spinning doors and metal.
but the girl didn't speak skyscraper,
so she went inside and took an elevator
14 flights only to find that
he'd posted a sign over the penthouse window
with a downwards pointing arrow and
the words "Man + Gravity for Life" etched inside,
she ran at the window
and jumped for dear life,
hoping that
the train created by the ghosts of theories past
tailing her spectrum-soaked body in vertical procession
would finally make her the velocity of bride
he'd always dreamed of.
The probability of her
becoming history
was nearly perfect;
survival
was merely
an outlier.
On Learning How to Let Yourself Be Loved
"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection." –Buddha
"You are the love of your own life. Act like it." -Tara Hardy
If you're going to let yourself be loved,
you've got to mean it with your chest
your anchors for arms
hands pinned behind your neck,
waiting for the shot.
You've got to make a drive-through chapel of your body
surrender yourself to being the source of the joy even if you can't hold it in your hands
sign off on making their moments miraculous
and let the butterfly effect be enough.
You've got to be enough.
You've got to be sleepless in Seattle
or Jersey City
or wherever the spirit moves you
to race the night
in the pursuit of facing the morning light
in the arms of another.
You've got to be domino enough for affection,
pulse enough to be shocking in your rhythm and rise.
If you're going to let yourself be loved,
sometimes, you've got to be Japan
exploding in the miscalculated of your brilliance
just to rediscover your ties to the ground
to make a mess of everybody's business and
a beauty of their recovery
to find degrees of freedom
in our fondness for relativity
in our inability to slice ourselves incomplete
in a world of so many sparks and quarks and invisible connections.
You've gotta be the first law of thermodynamics
crafted and shattered and reconstructed again
to mold a reactor from your heart's dark matter
and birth energy from fragments of what it means to be human
radiating everything inexplicably holy and carpe diem and light
because if you're going to let yourself be loved,
you've got to accept that is the only self
that's ever going to get the chance to reciprocate
your energies in this universal dance,
so do it humanly whole
with streetlights staggering your smile,
chest leaking everything you never thought beautiful enough to say
into tattoos of the futures you never thought potential enough to pray for.
Create a billboard of the way
your vulnerability spills onto paper.
Make of your beloved
an ink stain
of all the ways you can contort your body
into forever and a day.
If you ever doubt yourself,
close your eyes
until your afterthoughts become gamma rays
& your insecurities become stars
and remember that everything you are
is what the universe dreamed of
when she invented the word "love" in the first place
so, as far from it as you may feel,
your every breath
will always be its birthplace.
Ouija
Her friends
warned her about the risk
inherent in making a homemade Ouija board-
the need to curse the very thing you loved,
to open up its insides
like a burn victim
and call the aftermath
consequence-
so when they found her
sitting Indian-style
legs folded
like infinity decided it was cool to be square,
carving the words "yes" and "no" into her chest
as if challenging the universe to check her,
no one jumped at the sight of the blood
or asked her why she did it.
Instead, they took turns swirling sponges
around the sacred of her heart
and waited
for a message
anything
to let them know that there was life
after death-
even the beating kind.
Table of Contents
Letter to My 7th Grade Self (April 20, 2010. Issue 16.)
Ditch the shy act.
Wear a skirt.
Dye your hair in every color of the rainbow-tinted galaxy.
You’ve always been a ball of light bursting at the seams, so why stop
reflecting the future now?
Be a time capsule full of deferred dreams.
Breathe life back into them until they break the dawn.
Sing out-
God’ll still love you, even if you crack,
so let your voice shatter into a million little pieces,
then write a book about it.
At least this time around, you’ll give ‘em something to believe in.
Swallow your pride-do the English homework.
Trust me, it’ll pay off later, especially the stuff about the boring old
poets.
Yes, Shakespeare is dead,
but in 5 years you’ll be vying for the chance to revive his spirit on your
tongue,
no Ouija board needed-just projection, but it’ll come.
Love like no one’s watching.
Better yet,
love like God is watching from a corner with popcorn in hand.
You’re life’s better than a movie-you’re just too young to understand the
subtext.
Subtract the moments spent stressing and breathe.
Give mom the extra air through exhalations
and cushion her wings when she falls.
Love dad,
with all his cracks and crevices.
Learn to speak Cutty.
Carve Sark teeth into reparations.
Learn the serenity prayer in advance.
Acquait the pounding on the walls
with your first experience with hip-hop,
and not a dance with the devil.
Beat-box a rhythm in the key of life over it.
Call this poetry.
Call this life a stage.
Call this world your audience.
Call static
dissension.
Call off button
a release.
Mute buttons-insecurity.
Call yourself a
Technicolor angel-
disco balls for eyes,
ghettoblasters for heartbeat.
Call your mistakes b-sides.
Call suburban streets your playground.
Chalk outlines-
the coloring books for your rendezvous with rebellion.
Dance until their borders realign themselves around your shadow
and make the canvas your dancefloor.
Call this beautiful.
Call your voice a paint can.
Your passion: vandalism.
Your lovers: victims.
Your tears: tags.
Your heart: sacred.
Your past: mosaic.
Your future: unwritten
Your present: just the beginning.