Fire Roulette is Jeanette Clough’s fifth poetry collection. An earlier book, Flourish, was a finalist in the Otis College of Art and Design, and the Eastern Washington University book competitions. Other publications include Island from Red Hen Press and two artist books, Stone and Rx. Her poetry received awards from the Los Angeles Poetry Festival Fin de Millennium, Ruskin Art Club, and Rainer Maria Rilke International Poetry competitions, a Commendation in Aesthetica Creative Works in England, and Pushcart nominations. Clough edited for Solo, A Journal Poetry; Foreshock, An Anthology of Poems from the Midnight Special; and reviewed for Poetry International. Among the journals publishing her poems are Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, Spillway, Miramar, and Wisconsin Review. A native of Paterson, N.J., she holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, and was an art librarian at the Getty Research Institute. She co-directed the Los Angeles Barnes & Noble and Rose Café poetry series, and hosted Poetry at Bell Arts in Ventura. She was artist-in-residence at Joshua Tree National Park where for many years she taught outdoor desert poetry workshops.
Three Poems by Jeanette Clough
Night Dive
I am the foreign body wearing neoprene, descending
into the Caribbean Sea wrapped in forty pounds
of gear and I anticipate sinking like a rock,
but scientific fact and good equipment let me hover
underwater over the sand, breath balanced in and out,
body rising then lowering, as if weightless, safely above
the banded sea snake with black rings precisely spaced
along its white body, settled on the floor, docile but deadly.
I propel myself with artificial fins. A nocturnal octopus
blends with a rock. Two sea turtles swing by. A flotilla
of barracuda, then another of squid, half-imagined
in the blurred distance. Beneath me a sting ray
disguises itself under a thin layer of sand, only eyes
and gills unveiled. We are a small group, patient
with each other, willing to wait while a diver lingers,
transfixed, floating inside the sea. Our oxygen lowers
and we return, an armada swaying in the night’s current,
timing ourselves to rise slowly. I break the surface, remove
my mouthpiece and take in again the night air. Our bodies,
snug in their own suits. We can hear each other breathe.
Fire Roulette (Cahuenga Press, 2025)
Ardor
Pick a direction left or right
to the street where oblivious to traffic, ballet boys
and ballet girls parade down the center line
swaying on bright muscled legs, roughing up their toes,
brushing the asphalt with lamb’s wool and sequins,
with lost elastic and satin ribbons, performing their steps
with a sharp hunger that will solve every problem, with
ardor hard as a rose-cut diamond set in platinum, in angles
that refract and will not, no matter what, be still.
Wisconsin Review 50.2 (2017), in Fire Roulette (Cahuenga Press, 2025)
Uncommon Bounty
The sky has been turning shades of slate
for several miles with us driving under its lowering
tent. An abrupt downpour cuts rivulets
into the hard-tack ground. We are surprised
rain survives its descent through parched air
without evaporating, to drop needles on the unflinching
windshield that flicks them aside with wipers and speed.
The other surprise is this rainbow over salt brush
and stubble, the end of its spectrum arc pacing the car
as if to grant an indulgence, or simply to mark
a gift of water in the dry place through which we pass.
Fire Roulette (Cahuenga Press, 2025)
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Three poems from Mariano’s new book The Weight of Sound (Walton Well Press, Los Angeles, 2025).
Vaporetto
It’s late and we take the last vaporetto
to go back to the hotel.
We will be there in no time at all, I want to say.
But I don’t say anything because
we are not talking much today.
After a couple of minutes, we realize
that we have taken the wrong vaporetto,
in the wrong direction, that we are trapped
where we don’t want to be.
You remove your small backpack,
drop it on the floor.
I lean my forehead against a windowpane.
The glass is wet, cold.
Our sense of touch is controlled
by a network of nerve endings
and touch receptors in the skin
known as the somatosensory system.
There is no place to sit.
We are next to each other, standing, unstable.
There are mechanoreceptors for movement,
nociceptors for pain,
thermoreceptors for temperature,
proprioceptors for location and position.
I wonder if there are receptors
for the skin to say
how it wants to be touched.
Receptors for repulsion.
Exposure
The summer
brought you back.
Not the tentative, early summer.
The furniture still cold and sleepy.
Not the last days of summer,
melancholic, licking the forehead
of autumn.
The heart of summer.
The rooftops offered to the sky
like skinned knees.
The light— flat, unstoppable.
No place to hide.
No other season.
— Has it been already fifteen years?
— Exactly fifteen years and three months, since you left.
Some Notes on How to Grow Strawberries
He doesn’t know what to do, where to go.
Listen to your inner voice, people tell him.
Find a hobby— painting, gardening.
He tries gardening.
Take one strawberry, scrape at the seeds,
place them on a paper towel to dry them out.
He keeps seeds in small envelopes
with handwritten labels.
Find seedling pots (as many as needed).
Fill up each pot with soil, pour a little water.
Sometimes he mislabels the envelopes.
Seeds look alike, they are so small,
so insignificant, they weigh almost nothing.
Get your seeds,
and let one or two fall into the middle of each pot.
Each seed knows the road ahead,
and the road behind.
Your seeds will germinate and create
small visible seedlings in around 2 to 3 weeks.
The seeds know what to do.
Even the ones in the wrong envelopes,
even the ones with no labels.
