Jessica Dawn Zinz

Background features two close-up images of blue draping shapes, which are the blue tailfins of Siamese fighting fish. Centered on the bottom of the page, below the poem, is a collaged image of two people standing close to one another. One has an arm wrapped around the back of the other with their hand resting on the partner’s shoulder. The person on the left is wearing an oversized green sweatshirt and their head has been replaced with the head of an Atlantic Green Turtle. The one on the right has a black leather jacket and their head has been replaced with the head of a jaguar. The couple is standing in a pool of blood-tinged water, which is the result of shark fishing.

Notes /Materials:
collaged images primarily from National Geographic (1988)
text sourced from This Child’s Gonna Live (1969, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.)

dripping a few drops of blood and then—

You could reach for her in the bleached-out belly
of the cedar tree and call her Sparrow

The sounds of her twitching body are like a heavy
flower or vine almost like the word milk

when a woman is aching
and her chest ain’t doing nothing
and the baby is starving

Stop to catch your breath hung on that tree

Sometimes the heart under your ribs catches stillness
sprawled and twisting in the cold water

Just go on
You’re a mother

You could reach up to get a piece of paper and pencil
and move a chair over to the window
and drink all you want to
But she is in the room sleeping
and wants you to know a kicking went on
inside of her too

[Two-page poem}
Page 1 features a large black crow taking up the entire left margin, beak protruding into the center of the page. Along the bottom half of the page, a crumbling cement wall, moves across the page, mostly consisting of cement beams with the center walls destroyed. At the last cement beam, closest to the viewer, a young boy in shorts and a t-shirt hides behind the beam pointing a small handgun toward the next page.

Notes /Materials:
collaged images primarily from National Geographic Magazine Vol. 179 No. 3 March 1991
text sourced from Traits of a Healthy Family (Ballantine Books, 1983)

[I draw the shape of our family table]

I draw the shape of our family table
and I know it is not healthy
but I place swirls around it
as if a child is worried

about where she has to sit in school
about all that can go wrong in a minute in her classroom
about the amount of blood in the hearts
of children in alligator shirts

How will I show our daughter this?

What will she draw?

In the background, the earth with a haze of clouds over it has been cut into a grid, leaving empty white squares with the earth left in gridlines, taking up most of the background. Along the bottom and moving up the right margin, a grided bar graph starts with a few red boxes and increases in the length of each bar as it moves toward the right; along the right margin, the grided bar graph switches from red to yellow. On the bottom half of the page, two young girls, wearing tank tops and shorts, play with hula hoops. The older of the two is swirling a hula hoop around her waist. The younger one holds it above her head.

Notes /Materials:
collaged images primarily from National Geographic Magazines (current)
text sourced from Pregnancy After a Loss: A Guide to Pregnancy After a Miscarriage, Stillbirth, or Infant Death (Penguin Publishing Group, 1999)

Doula

In her third trimester
the sun started breathing

                                                            I was secretly praying
                                                            she would go into labor
                                                                                with 380,000 babies

and I would be her doula

But I wasn’t
None of us would be

All of our children will ask

“Oh, did you have trouble
locating the heartbeat?”

Jessica Dawn Zinz is a writer, artist, and professor living in Ohio. She has a Creative Writing MFA and teaches writing at Bowling Green State University. Her poetry, artwork, and visual poems have been published most recently in TAB Journal, ctrl+v journal, RHINO Poetry, and Harpy Hybrid Review. Her work has been anthologized in the Driftwood 2024 Anthology. She is currently working on visual poetry, collage poetry, and other hybrid writing and art related to aging, pregnancy, motherhood, and marriage.