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 forthcoming 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.

Din 

From perceiving in fragments, gusts. 

Particulated;  traveling fast as part of the rain.
 
Fingernails when they rap the window, bee-like.

A swarm, angled. 

I fancy it, the sweetness: 
let not the stick of it go.

When I look at my eyes I see two propellers.

Things are landing

in swarms, at angles.  The tilt 

into vacancy.  Fold,   

unfold.  

Colorado Review, v33 (Spring 2006), p. 63.

Chance

Shows itself, when you return from getting the mail at night,

as an airplane, a planet, and a partial moon studding the sky
like three lost earrings suspended in Mozart or in blown glass.

A man demonstrates the fragile art of blowing perfume bottles. 
One of the bottles breaks, which is not part of the plan.

Do you know that trio in the sky?  It plays to the tune of a spirit level.

When the level shifts, the spirit bubble softens like a glissando
in a Dali timepiece.

Remember, this is about chance and its games.

Where on the roulette wheel do you throw your money,
and does it matter?

Wheels are round, and chance is a wheel.   Grab anywhere. 
It will take you full circle if you can hang on. 

As a matter of course, the wheel will run you into the ground.
 
You might get discouraged and let go, often near the top
when all your weight dangles, when something might happen

that hasn’t before, the curves you can’t see around
or get enough of: the definition of desire.

In Posse Review (inpossereview.com), Issue 25

Salt

I choose salt, a common mineral unfit for jewelry. 
Its ladder is fragile and vital, which other jewels are not. 

Salt lives in the blood.
It does not care how it is seen

but cares a great deal how it is savored on the tongue.

I cannot live without you, jewel of choice. 

I work myself into your skin so we will last together a long time,
older and tougher. 

I adorn my body with salt.  You comply,
an animal drawn to the lick. 

Predators skirt the underbrush but we ignore them
because our hunger is more huge. 

I wish to be nowhere but encasing the saltiness of you.

Steam Ticket:  A Third Coast Review, v XV (Spring 2012):  p. 73

© 2013 Jeanette Marie Clough