‘Jinx It’ by Jennifer Met

Untitled 4
by Arun Kapur

Jinx It

I.

It’s so far north that the stars are too low, sliding like weak refrigerator magnets scraping the horizon. As I walk to the mailbox, the storm of heavenly pinpoints crowd just above my head and follow me, like a cloud of river gnats, like a virus-filled cough. The hazy belt of the galaxy sagging. I run inside again to my tiny room in the attic that is covered with burnt orange rug and smells like hot wood. Alone, I catch my breath. Alone, I breathe.

an owl’s call—
the dark blue swells
of almost night

II.

The light switch is at my fingertips and I flip it on. I linger in the faint aura of that final, lone ember before it extinguishes, just waiting for it to give out to the vast blackness beyond. The night sky edging closer—the meaty periphery of The Great Unknown not nearly meaty enough. I pump the hand sanitizer and jump into bed, pulling the covers close around me so that nothing touches the dirty floor. I try to lie perfectly still, sweating in my cocoon. I try to minimize the rising and returning of my chest and see how long I can go without blinking. I try to play possum—dead—on my pyre. I try not to think.

washed in moonlight
the tortoise’s polished shell—
a stepping stone 

III.

Here, there is no distinguishing body from the air within it. Here is the definition of place. And it’s here I’ve been—for about a month, holding my breath—at the edge of everything. Consoling myself that, here, I am safe from COVID-19. Safer than I am from alien abduction, but safe even from that, because they say that only the ones who secretly want it are taken.

darkness falls—
a full moon over
the forest’s lacy garter

IV.

Here, I exhale and it’s as invisible as a slow growl. Sooooo, I find myself thinking. But I don’t even want to think about it. Jinx it. It isn’t the same without city lights. Without all the neon itching my neurons clean or roommates to tell me it’s crazy. Without history books or universities to stop me running revisions through my head. Without manicured parks and graveyards full of benches. With nothing but stories swelling the shadows, hiking the curve, and reminding me that yes, this happens all the time, and yes, maybe I should be afraid.

So, maybe it is just the idle resonance of curiosity. A past obsession with data and genderless sci-fi thrillers. An afterimage of too much city and school. Sooooo….what…what…now?

from the cottonwood
an owl disappears
to star and sky

V.

No, I don’t want to think about it. Jinx it. I should stop looking up—searching, rifling, through the attic skylight—so the whites of my eyes don’t show. And maybe if I’m sleeping They won’t be able to see me. I wrap the cocoon tighter. Or…maybe I should stop sleeping altogether—just curl up in the corner with my back pressed against the wall so I can see Them coming from every direction. Try to shrink a little closer into the planks, the unlit porch, the woodpile, the farm’s weather-border of ponderosa pine. Try to mask my musk with the smell of nowhere.

night sky above
the broken tree branch
heavy with snow 

VI.

I stop myself from going downstairs to find my phone. The constant, tragic updates like gossip—the comforting kind—about someone else. I would be too vulnerable outside my made warmth. I would feel too small. I would be too much. And maybe I should turn out the light and stop my mind speaking altogether, but can I risk leaving my blanket? I should stop my mind speaking. I should. I know I should. Now. It’s foolish to broadcast myself like this! Under clothes my skin is too naked. Everything’s slower here and I seem to be thinking more and more in the tiny lulls between words.

refreshing the screen—
the full moon
and a passing cloud

VII. 

But maybe I’m not alone. Maybe the sky is full of porch lights. I take long walks every damn day just to remember what faces can look like. I have seen my only neighbor eating the season’s first peaches, her fingers sticky, through the window. She eats them intensely, with both hands grasping. With her whole face, like a predator. Her eyes glowing. Her cliché breasts heaving. Her lips smacking, as if in conversation. Maybe I should say something after all, I think, but keep my distance, just like a good girl should.

winter dawn—
a featureless sky
folds toward me 

VIII.

But oh, I really don’t want to think about it. Jinx it. Maybe I’ll wear tinfoil over my head to scramble the signal. The shiny flashes like Christmas tinsel, all happy. Like static cartwheeling— the constant crinkling as that of water’s wandering, always away. 

But what if this just reminds Them of sun coruscating on a lake, begging to be broken with a dive? So maybe I’ll just think gibberish and maybe then They can’t read my thoughts or anticipate any objections. Because if They hear me thinking about Them, They’ll definitely come. To probe me. Will it be like a dream, or like a hospital incubation? Will it be a test? 

They’ll come to change me maybe. Maybe forever. Or watch me. With or without judgment—it doesn’t really matter which. And maybe I wouldn’t even know it, like the webcam’s eye when the Zoom meeting’s over, the screen a blank… 

the chicken egg—
a snowy white
against cupped hands

IX.

But then I’m thinking too much again…too involved in myself. Obsessed with the space within a single, partial letter under the night’s spilled ink.

garter snake
matching the asphalt
warmth

X.

So it’s beginning to get cold and foreign and harsh out here. Even Mother Earth, instead feeling like an embracing bosom, is starting to pull away from me. Like nature, too, is social distancing—suddenly six feet away like absolutely everyone else. Like the horizon. Like God. Like loneliness—the loneliness I no longer notice. This—this is the window cracking for outer space. The endless boredom, like existential tickertape, is killing me! Rat-a-tat-tat, until I’m left looking surprised and slightly embarrassed, red foam leaking from under my ever-masked mouth.

And maybe that’s okay. Conceivably dying could be preferable…

drifting asleep
on a summer lake—
bubbles, too, lifting  

XI.

I jerk myself awake. Because really I don’t want to think about that either. Jinx it. Because I don’t know that it’s true and I don’t even know why I thought I did. The heavens look vast but are collapsed in two dimensions. The heavens look beautiful but easily disappear under a full moon. And, after all, maybe if I never think about it, it won’t happen. Won’t even exist. “Death?” I’ll say. “Huh. Sounds like something ancient.”  

And I’m too thirsty to think anyhow. I’ll just wipe it out of my mind. Leave it nameless, faceless, unknown. Mysterious and unreal as a meal’s mouthfeel with no taste.

ragged coyotes call—
the flat dawn’s gray
a gift 

XII.

Somehow, it is almost morning. But even during the day They are still there. Stars are still shining, I just can’t see them beyond the sun’s brilliance. That is, until the inevitable night strips the sky’s blue veil once more. So I must not think. There is no end, no goal-line. This is not a game, I think. 

But maybe if They can read my thoughts They know that I thought to think this. Or that thinking I might have thought I thought not to think anymore at all. Their green, probing antenna, like viral spikes, targeted tight. Something like finally shaking hands after months of online research—something like sighing, but even more desperate. Something like love. 

icicles reach
I fancy narcissus blooms
answer


XIII.

I’m still thinking. My prison pen pal, an otherworldly beckoning, I think. A feed-worthy, train-wreck tragedy in the making, I think. Maybe it’s already too late and They’re here, knocking at the door, smiling faces bared. Breathing, breathing, and breathing. “Jinx,” I’ll exhale.

But maybe this is somehow just what I secretly wanted.

noontime heat—
restless legs
reveal my shadow


Jennifer Met (she/her) lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gone Lawn, The Museum of Americana, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Superstition Review, and Zone 3, among other journals. She currently serves as an Assistant Prose Poetry Editor at Pithead Chapel. She is also the author of the microchapbook That Which Sunlight Chases (Origami Poems Project) and the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).


Arun Kapur is a mental health advocate that uses the medium of the arts to raise awareness of stigmas and well-being. Enigmatic. Charismatic. Passionate. Lover of life and all truth that binds us together. He believes that through art, life is created. Twitter: @arunkapur333.