#postcards from the circus

rustbeltjessie:

Postcards from the Circus, 5: Dear One (The Art of Burning Bridges and Grinning Broadly) // Jessie Lynn McMains, June 2021

Dear one—

I knew a man who was his own ten-in-one. A trickster with a three-ring brain, the magician from his own tarot deck. He breathed fire in every town from Bridgewater to Birmingham, got kicked out of punk clubs and burned city halls to ash. He was a legend, the kind that comes in the night in a black coat & boots, that tempts you to follow your circus heart’s most overwhelming desires, makes you wonder if you’re dreaming. And in my dreams, I burnt every bridge and followed him from Chicago to Chattanooga. But one day I woke to find him gone & there were no more circuses for me to join. I’d spent so much time running away. I never would have left, had he stayed.

rustbeltjessie:

Postcards from the Circus, 4: Dearest (Closest Thing to Heaven) // Jessie Lynn McMains, June 2021

Dearest—

In a garden of stained glass & vines, I confessed my circus sins to a clown priest. My penance was to recite the Hail Emmett & the Our Lou while I stuck eight pearl-headed hat pins through my painted cheeks. And then I danced on a blanket of glass while I played a sad-clown valse on my accordion. By the time I’d finished I was wild-eyed, wet with sweat & blood, grease-paint running in rivulets down my cheeks. A Russian girl read the cards for me and I set my accordion on fire, said: “Welcome to Hell, here’s your squeezebox!” And I saw that place & that night were the closest thing to heaven I’d ever find.

rustbeltjessie:

Postcards from the Circus, 3: Dearest, Most Beautiful Baby (The Spells He Cast) // Jessie Lynn McMains, May 2021

Dearest, most beautiful (baby)—

I remember the circus motel and a door numbered 30, and how the trains came thundering by with their cargo of corn syrup and drywall, and I could have had the circus bear but I chose the thaumaturge and his ruddy mouth. O the spells he cast: spell of bend-me-in-half, spell of me dying to cry out, spell of bone-bruise, spell of baby in my belly. Real magic. The only illusion was thinking that he really loved me.

rustbeltjessie:

Postcards from the Circus, 2: Dear Dear Wonderful You (Every Rose Has Its Thorn) // Jessie Lynn McMains, May 2021

Dear dear wonderful you—

I came here with nothing but my ghost-heart & my rose tattoos. Once I was Rose Red, but my sister—O my sister—Snow White drifted off with a dancing bear. Now, a ghost girl by any other name, I am. And here I stand on this stage, with the spotlight blooming red, and stick myself pin-full. Every rose has its thorn.

rustbeltjessie:

Postcards from the Circus, 1: Dear One (A Prayer for the Roustabouts) // Jessie Lynn McMains, May 2021

Dear One—

A prayer for the roustabouts & rabbit wranglers. For the funnel cake-makers & flea trainers. For the face painters and fire-breathers. Pray for the bearded lady, the snake charmer, the magician & the huckster & me. There is no carnival season, this year.

Last year, I briefly did a thing where, if people ordered a copy of The Lonelist Show On Earth directly from me, or if they ordered it from Bottlecap Press (before they took it out of print) and sent me proof of purchase, I’d write them a brand-new postcard poem inspired by the epistolary sections of TLSOE. This was the first one.

rustbeltjessie:

The Loneliest Show On Earth, by Jessie Lynn McMains [Bottlecap Press, February 2020]

In this book-length fabulist poem, Jessie Lynn McMains uses the backdrop of the circus, sideshow, and carnival world to work through issues of identity, community, loss, trauma, and desire.

At the heart of The Loneliest Show On Earth are these questions: when you are, in some way, Other, what is there to do but run away with the circus (either real or metaphorical)? And then, when the traumas you experience among the people who were supposed to keep you safe, turn out to be just as bad as anything that happens in the outside world—or when the circus closes its tent flaps for good—where do you go from there? When you run away from the circus, will there be another one to join?

“Jessie Lynn McMains opens The Loneliest Show On Earth with a quirky, archetypal invitation: ‘Ladies & jellyspoons, boys/& ghouls—Step right up & see/a true freak, a real/me,’ drawing us into the circus and the freakish picaresque of female selfhood—'O my chimerical sister,/ my metaphor, myself.’ And thus we tumble into this many-headed hybrid, a book-length novelistic poem/poemish novel that, within the image palette of the circus freak show, contemplates gender, romance, myth, loneliness, and identity. ‘Yes, I traveled back & forth across America, small town to smaller, destroying amber waves/of eligible bachelors,’ she riffs. 'I am a one-woman Dust Bowl.’ Let it be said McMains knows the realm of which she speaks, from funnel cake to Bearded Lady to the woman who dances on shards of glass. I recommend you step right up and in; read this delight by a 'divinatrix in her tent of stars.’”
—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl andStill Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

“What if a band of feral punk nomads – raised in the woods, and wielding an oracular language of intimacy, artifice, and daggers – rode into town and made a circus for the weirdos? What if The Waste Land took place on a fairground with winged girls and infants in jars? Jessie Lynn McMains’s The Loneliest Show on Earth understands the gendered body like a sideshow tent of strangeness, an arena in which cacophonous voices – and stories of competing origins – play out against death in the glimmering spotlight. To quote McMains, this gorgeous and unsettling elegy is 'too damn special for the normie world’; it revels, deliriously and deliciously, in its own stunning freakiness.”
—Marty Cain, author of Kids of the Black Hole

Excerpts:
[I’m billed as the Loneliest Woman on Earth]
[Dear One— It’s the First of May]
[O sing a song of midway lights]