Jess

BIO:

So my name is Jess Hess and I’ve just sat staring at an empty Word document for about five minutes because I really don’t know what to say about myself. I like to tape pictures to my walls and I like to wear bracelets on my wrists. I like long car rides and empty journals and diet coke. I write about summer and sadness and, apparently, the smell of raspberries. I fell in love with singing before I fell in love with anything else, and so that is what I decided that I was going to do. One day I sat down at my piano and wrote a song, and that is when I fell in love with ivory. Soon after that I sat down with an empty journal in the middle of the night because I could not sleep and I wrote about my life, and so I fell in love with words. I have now been writing one poem a day for a year and 125 days, precisely. I like to know that someday I can go back and read these and maybe it will stop be from forgetting. My hair is quite long, but I want it to be longer. And that is all I have to say about myself.

The sun melted into the sky the day we found paradise. The rubber grass kissed our pink nail-polished bubble toes as we drank in the sweet aroma of beeswax and maple trees. Diamonds sparkled in the corners of our eyes because we were alive under the picture book clouds and we were each spinning on the same earth. And we didn’t know what we wanted to do on that earth other than be alive and spin and drink in beeswax and maple trees.

We were queens that day in our own right. With woven dandelion crowns and tree stump thrones. And as we watched over our kingdom, we shared with each other secrets of the universe. Like how defeat feels like an itchy carpet against your cheek. And how love and lust both smell like raspberry. And how silence is the loudest sound to listen to.

That was the day that we let ourselves cry like watering cans, and laugh like thunder storms. And as we began to reach the horizon between collectedness and insanity, we buried our noses into each other’s bony shoulders, and sang improvised songs from the soundtrack of our souls. And told ourselves that there was no one but us. There was no one but us.

The sun melted into the sky the day we found paradise. And as we watched it sink, burn, and disappear like a missile in slow-motion water colors, we gave up our dandelion crowns and tree stump thrones, and we headed back home. Five shes instead of one we. Drowning in the sudden darkness after twilight, we were queens no more.