Jeanette Marie Clough is a native of Paterson, New Jersey. She received a graduate degree from the University of Chicago, and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Clough has edited for Solo, A Journal of Poetry, and reviewed for Poetry International and Caesura. Flourish, her recent book from Tebot Bach, was a finalist in the Seismicity (Otis College of Art and Design) and Blue Lynx (Eastern Washington University) annual book competitions. Earlier collections include Island (Red Hen) and Cantatas. She is also author of two artist’s books, Stone and Rx, designed by Tania Baban and published by Conflux Press.Clough has published widely in such journals as Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Birmingham Review, Pool, Atlanta Review, Askew, Paterson Literary Review, Spillway, Steam Ticket, Nimrod, Rattle and Wisconsin Review, and online in poeticdiversity and poetrybay. Her work is anthologized in No Place for a Puritan: Poetry of the California Desert; White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood; Off the Cuffs: An Anthology of Police Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poetry received awards in competitions for the Los Angeles Poetry Festival's Fin de Millenium, Spillway's Walt Whitman Call and Response, the dA Arts Center, and the Ruskin Art Club, and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Clough co-created the monthly Poem.X series and was a founding member of the weekly Hyperpoets series.  During 2012, she was Artist in Residence in Joshua Tree National Park.

Evocation

She must practice, away from the comforter,

the form letter, the pin numbers and transfer,

as in delphinium.  A beginning without end is vertigo. 

There it is, bigger.  Orange, like the fruit. 

                                       *

How she loves the small lines decorating her face. 

An evening redness in the west is full of dry color

and the evocation of future memories. Especially at night,

discoveries repeat in the undesignated city.

Published in Colorado Review, 41.1

Turquoise

I wish I had a story to tell
besides the stories everyone knows —

about light and the tinge overhead
when it comes and goes

the way tunes on the radio change
one to the next.  Refreshing

how sky covers the spectrum in the paint section
of a hardware store. Samples are labeled Azure,

Cirrus, Drifting, Boundless, Swan, Windy,
Dew. I want all of them to thrive

on my walls.  For my neck and ears
I claim turquoise settling into silver. 

Minerals move slowly.  This overture starts moderato
then cuts, without compromise, into shine.  

Published in Flourish

 Alight  

She thinks the afternoon is cool enough
and walks too long in the sun.  Streets are named for it

but none called Rabbit-Soft Dusk.  Is it the same day
as this morning?  The colors are different.

She gets help settling in, someone on the other side
to balloon the top sheet. The soprano hum of flies.

The rhythm is crepuscular, attuned to the coming
and going of light.  A cottontail emerges and bites its paw

for fleas.  She washes the dishes by battery lamp. 
Her sister’s Portuguese douro tinto is warm, good.

Published in Apercu Quarterly 3.3

© 2015 Jeanette Clough