Tag: Jennifer Abod

Quiet Cup by Jennifer Abod

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Quiet Cup
Day after the LA Fire started (January 2025)

This morning, the wide plastic, ugly gray lid on the industrial garbage can in the alley outside my kitchen window is blocking my quiet morning view: high polled wires in an open sky, lush green trees in the distance. The apartment owner next door put a lock on the lid after the fire a few weeks ago that woke Winnie, the dog, who woke my stepdaughter in her upstairs apartment at four AM. By the time she alerted me, she had called the fire department. I watched them in the dark as they tried to stop the flames rising to our roof. I couldn’t help imagining the person who did it, someone who can’t take care of himself, who yells at himself on street corners, leaves empty 7-Eleven cups in our parkway grass, deciding to just do something. I drink coffee looking at the burnt pile of vine branches and lifeless leaves on our charred wood fence, march determinedly to the back-alley, slam shut the lid, return to the house hoping the person who lit the fire finds something else to do.

*

Jennifer Abod is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, radio broadcaster and jazz singer. She is a former assistant professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. Her poems appear in One Art Journal, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, Wild Crone Wisdom, Artemis Journal, Fruitslice, Discretionary Love, Persimmon Tree and are forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, James Crew’s Love Anthology, Vita and the Woolf. www.jenniferabod.com

Two Poems by Jennifer Abod

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Rethinking Pink

I hated pink.
It surrounded me
in my mother’s
Chicago kitchen:
bubble-gum pink tiles,
café curtains, counter tops,
the dial-up wall phone.
Pink, the color I ran away from,
my mother’s version
of who I was supposed to be.
In my kitchen, I fold
a muted pink bath towel,
remember, how it complimented
Angela’s wet brown shoulders,
her clear eyes,
reminds me why I keep
one frayed pink-cotton turtleneck,
in my closet,
Two pink-plastic flowered bottles,
on my bathroom shelf.

*

Dance Lesson

Angela and I
would dance
in the living room,
on a sidewalk,
at the beach

I had four decades
to memorize her dancing,
how it stirred the air

That last time,
her flowered dress,
legs at rest
in the wheelchair,
I sway her arms
high and wide
her eyes,
like pools of rain
in moonlight.

Now, wherever I am,
and a soulful beat
takes hold,
I dance,

She’d want me
to let sorrow go.

*

Dr. Jennifer Abod is an award-winning filmmaker and radio broadcaster. Her poems appear in Sinister Wisdom, ONE ART: a journal of poetry and The Metro Washington Weekly, and are forthcoming in Wild Crone Wisdom, and Artemis Journal. Jennifer was the singer in the pioneering New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band (1970-1976). For the past year, she’s been singing jazz standards and contemporary tunes every Thursday night at Chez Bacchus a restaurant, in Long Beach, CA.

ONE ART’s nominations for Best Spiritual Literature

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~ ONE ART’s nominations for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) ~ 

Amit Majmudar – Constancy
Bracha K. Sharp – After The Questions
Jennifer Abod – At the Indian Ocean
Pauli Dutton – While Teaching Line Dancing at a Senior Center, Someone Accuses Me of Always Being Happy
Donna Spruijt-Metz – Day 0: Shekhinah
Robin Turner – The Unfolding

Envy by Jennifer Abod

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Envy

New Haven, Connecticut, 1979

I hate washing dishes,
but for her, it’s meditation,
where she choreographs,
imagines her next moves.

That first summer,
I lean into Angela’s kitchen doorway,
the Victorian house
where she mothers two young children,
raised two girls, rescued from abuse,
mourned her first-born son, Kippy,
killed at three, by a drunk driver.
I can’t believe she’s let me in.

Water trickles into the
double porcelain sink.
Pink calico curtains
flutter in the breeze.

I admire her dancer’s back,
shapely legs, sandaled feet,
bare-brown arms in
her butter-yellow linen,
shirt.

Standing in her doorway,
as her hands caress
each plate,
I cannot believe,
how jealous I am
of every soapy dish.

*

Jennifer Abod, Ph.D. is an award-winning producer/director of both film and radio. Two of her four documentary films feature major poets of second wave feminism: Audre Lorde and Kitty Tsui. Abod organized and hosted the first virtual poetry reading featuring Lesbian Widows in 2021. Abod’s poetry appears in Sinister Wisdom and One Art. She is reading her poetry as part of OUTWRITE 2022 this month. She is working on her first poetry manuscript.

At the Indian Ocean by Jennifer Abod

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At the Indian Ocean

We had never seen a beach like this.
No lifeguard chairs or buildings
to burden the view

The lack of clocks,
sirens, gunshots,
held us as we hold hands

Watch the only human
graceful and slow,
like a tall black egret
across alabaster sand

*

Jennifer Abod, Ph.D. is an award-winning producer/director of both film and radio. Two of her documentaries feature major poets of the second wave: Audre Lorde and Kitty Tsui. She organized and hosted the first virtual poetry event featuring Lesbian Widows in 2021. Abod’s poetry appears in Sinister Wisdom. She is working on her first poetry manuscript.