#jessie lynn mcmains

fromReckless Chants #25, August 2019

dear xxxxxxx—

I miss you, you bastard. no. that’s not true. I haven’t seen or spoken to you in five years now, so I don’t miss YOU. I miss the you I knew back in the fucking day. I miss the me I was when I knew you. sometimes. (other times I could not give a damn. you knew I was gonna say that, didn’t you?)

most times I’m just tired of writing into & around this loss. I keep writing about what went wrong, trying to gain some closure, some new insight, but I still can’t figure it out. maybe because there was no ending, there was just a long, slow dissolution. there was no big fight, you just decided you hated me.

why? I know I said & did some shitty things. I regret hurting you, I regret hurting everyone I’ve ever hurt. I’d apologize & try to make right whatever it was I did that hurt or upset you enough to drop me for good, but you never told me, never gave me a chance to atone. for years, I racked my brain for what it could be. was it that time I fucked xxxx in your bed? but then, I said you had your blessing. you offered me the use of your bed, & we made jokes about it the next day. was it the time I sent you that drunken, freaked out text message accusing you of stealing my identity cuz you’d bought an accordion & started dating a guy I’d had a crush on? but I apologized the next day, you said you understood, & we made jokes about that for years afterward. was it that time I cried because I wanted you to come back to Chicago instead of staying in Texas, did you feel like I coerced you into moving back? I’m sorry about that, but then again it’s not like I forced you to do anything. you were an adult, you made your own choice, & I know there were other reasons for you to return to the great lakes. maybe, maybe you were hurt by that time I vagueposted on my blog about how I hated to see my friends getting grown-up jobs, how I wished we could stay weirdo artists & punx forever. I’m sorry about that. it was never meant as an attack on you, it was just me expressing my sadness over the way all of us (myself included) were changing.

I’ve rehashed all these moments & a hundred others, but I still don’t fucking get it. yeah, I made mistakes. regrets, I’ve had a few. but then again… it’s not like you never said anything that hurt my feelings, not like you never abandoned me, not like I never saw you through drunken nervous breakdowns & questionable hookups. we were both young, dumb, & full of cum, back then. both addicted to bad ideas.

maybe the reason you ghosted me is that you are truly ashamed of who you were back then, & I’m not. yeah, I’m sorry about any hurt I caused, but overall—I feel nothing but affection for my old selves, & I don’t regret the foolish things I did. maybe the main difference between you & me is you’ve always wanted to rid yourself of anything & anyone who might remind you of who you used to be, & I’m always talking about “back in the day.” okay, maybe I do cling too tight to the past, but is that a friendship-ending crime? I’ve always been this way & you know it.

& I know you’ve long had a habit of dropping friends. it was something I couldn’t see until you did it to me. (thinking now of that Tom-Waits-by-way-of-Hank-Rollins quote we oft repeated: “she’s a bitch. she did the same thing to me. she’ll do it every time.”) you’d be best good friends with someone for months or years & then one day you’d say “I can’t hang out with xxx anymore, they’re a bad person.” & you’d name something they did or some quality they possessed that made them a bad person. often, it was something you did, too, or a personality trait you’d liked when you first met them. like I said, I didn’t see it that way when we were still friends. I always took your side, never thought to question it, & I dropped them all, too. after all, if my best friend said they were bad people, they must’ve been bad people. & then you did the same thing to me. dropped me with no word, found the most passive aggressive way to let me know I’m a bad person in your eyes, & convinced a number of mutual friends (who were my friends first! who I introduced you to!) to cut me outta their lives. I never saw it coming, but—nobody ever sees it coming. I never dreamt things’d go bad between you & I.

for a while, I wanted to repair our friendship. I wanted you to realize you missed me. I wanted you to reach out, tell me what I did wrong so I could apologize for real, & have us pick up where we left off. if you’d done that in the first year or so after we last spoke, it probably would’ve worked. but now, it’s been too long & I’ve gone through too much hell because of it (it’s really hard for me to make friends these days—since you & xxx & xxxx & xxxxx dropped me I don’t trust anyone to stick around for the long haul) & even if you came crawling back to me, saying YOU were sorry, saying YOU were the one who’d fucked up, I wouldn’t be able to trust you enough to be your friend again. I’d like to say I’d at least be able to forgive you, but…I wouldn’t want to live in a world without grudges.

for a while, I wanted revenge. nothing big, just some kind of “how d’ya like them apples?” moment. like I wanted to tell you that I’m publishing the books of one current member of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, & might possibly be publishing an Inferno-related book by another current member. remember when we used to dream that one day we’d be on World/Inferno’s permanent guest list? well, now I AM, motherfucker. remember when xxxxx said you were riding my coattails, & we laughed, because what kind of raggedy-ass fucking coattails did I even have? I think of that & I think: if you were still riding my coattails, if you hadn’t dropped me, you could be my +1 to every Inferno show from now until the end of time. but thinking about rubbing your face in it doesn’t bring me any joy. it just makes me fucking sad.

I don’t know what I want. even if I could erase you from my memory, I wouldn’t want to, because you were there for so many of the defining events of my life. if I forgot you, I’d lose pieces of myself, too. I guess I want not to forget, but to let go. move on. I want to go certain places without worrying that I’ll run into you & have a public panic attack. start making new friends without fearing they’ll one day decide I’m shitty & abandon me. write about some different heartbreaks, for once. I suppose I’ll have to forgive you, someday, just for my own peace of mind. but I still don’t fucking know how. so until then—

we’ll make a toast to absent friends & better days.

to remembering, & being remembered, as brave (& not as a bunch of whining jerks).

to the quitters & complainers—
if we never meet again, remember this.

fromReckless Chants #25, August 2019

this time of year there is a quality of light that hurts the eyes. all that green against all that blue & the clouds shapeshifting across the sky. even on overcast days it burns itself into you, acid green, electric gray. this time of year is a quality of light that hurts the heart. I dream of never sleeping, of the demented orchestra of ice cream trucks, of staining my tongue blue in slushee eternities. sometimes I drove along the lakeshore on the south side of town & there is the skyline of Kenosha jutting out into the water, a hazy blue mirage. it looks like an enchanted city, a city of dreams, & I think maybe that’s why I’ve always romanticized Kenosha despite living in Racine—it’s easier to love a city when you see it from a slight distance, cloaked in blue mist, & can imagine it to be anything you want. when I arrive there it’s just another dirty old town, not that much different from my own; as soon as I leave I long to return again. the only time I feel such longing for Racine is when I see it from a different vantage point—like when I took xxx to the lighthouse & we looked at the silhouette of downtown against the fading blue & I said when I see it like this it’s magic, when I see it like this I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else.

fromReckless Chants #25, August 2019

Love Piece I

Write a love note so cryptic
it can only be understood
by the one for whom it is intended.

Transcribe it in Sharpie ink
inside a bathroom stall.

Had my first in-person poetry reading in 2.5 years at the Pollard Gallery in Kenosha on Saturday, and had to take the requisite photo of the merch table. I always wanted to be the merch person for a punk band, instead I’ve just always been my own merch person. (May 7, 2022)

I have a new chapbook, Left of the Dial, coming out from Scumbag Press in August. All the poems are about by my days as a college radio DJ, and/or inspired by songs I played on the air back then, hence the title. You can hear one of the poems, “No One’s Little Girl,” on Hello America’s Spring 2022 Collection.

fromReckless Chants #25, August 2019

dear xxx—

today I drove & wandered, my head filled with personal anniversaries. remembering the first time I hopped a train, from the twin cities to some one-horse Wisconsin town & back. crows in the dumpsters, abandoned factories, a bar with beer spilled sticky on the floor & dim red light spilling soft across the weathered faces of old men. remembering the first time xxxxxxx visited me, before we lived together. how I took him wandering my favorite train yard, how we kissed in the candlelight of my favorite bars. those are moments I keep in my pockets like hard candies, little drops of salt & rust to suck on, to savor when life is bland.

today I drove & found a park I’d never seen before. I walked the muddy, needled path into the woods, into the sunlight flickering dimly between the branches of the dark dark pines. I sat on a bench, poked the faded iridescence of a dead dragonfly with the toe of my boot, drank my iced coffee. I found a remnant of yellow chalk left by a child & drew my old hobo tag, the one I scribbled on boxcar walls back in my ramblin’ days—the saxophone with a dandelion sprouting from it, & the initials JJ. Jackie Jazz, the Dandelion Queen—that was one of my names.

some traveler kids came by, sat down near me. I gave them a couple cigarettes & they told me they were on a summertime hitchhike around the midwest. we talked trains & tattoos & I thought how glad it makes me to know there are still kids like we were, hitching & hopping across this country. then the boy pulled out his beautiful red guitar & played a Townes Van Zandt tune, one of those songs as wild & lonesome as the land. the red-winged blackbirds sang backup, swooping & squawking in the marsh grass. it was a moment I’ll carry with me, in my pocket next to that last letter from you.

that is my name.

fromReckless Chants #25, August 2019

I love the country highways at dusk & dawn. I love the backroads on August afternoons, the rolling hills, the moldering cemeteries next to rushing rivers. I love the old folk songs stuck in my head, the scratch & pop of my own personal field recordings. I love the tallgrass prairie, what’s left of it, the little protected patches of big bluestem & needle grass, bee-balm & spiderwort. I love the small towns & the faded signs, the Twi-Lite Motel. I love the blue highways at twilight when the whole world turns liminal, & o, I love it when the rain comes on.