Jeanne Morel and Anthony Warnke
It would be fun to write some of their biographies from the corner of the bistro. For that reason, I am writing you. I had seen vegetables flower in my own garden—cucumbers, beans, sesame, mustard greens—shy and fleeting among thick leaves. I wanted to run away as far as possible from the sweet scent of this “bourgeois poison.” Although the sound of logical thought is not appropriate here, I thought I would sound the alarm in sandwich class. Wait here for me like a good boy. A steel door opened, disappeared. At long last the smell of ancient paper rose in the air—the Ottoman Tax System. You could sit down with your head hurting. W9 forms are not retroactive, it seems, though generational trauma is an act of translation. Fewer and fewer pigeons made you remember who’s mouth. The whole mechanism evaporates, uncoiled. Vanishes.
* Italics are from Wang Ping.
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Jeanne Morel is the author of the chapbooks, I See My Way to Some Partial Results (Ravenna Press), Jackpot (Bottlecap Press), and That Crossing Is Not Automatic (Tarpaulin Sky Press). Her poem, “Loss & Other Forms of Death,” was selected by Leila Chatti for the 2021 Fugue Poetry Prize. Jeanne holds an MFA from Pacific University and has been nominated for a Pushcart in both poetry and fiction. She lives in Seattle where she teaches writing and is a gallery guide at the Frye Art Museum.
Anthony Warnke’s poetry has appeared in Cimarron Review, North American Review, Salt Hill, Sentence, Sixth Finch, and Sugar House Review, among other journals. His chapbook, Super Worth It, was just released by Newfound Press. He earned his Master’s degree in English from Western Washington University and is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches writing at Green River College and lives in Seattle.