Born in Independence, Kansas, John Jenkinson earned his PhD at the University of North Texas and his MFA at Wichita State University. Author of two prize-winning chapbooks, he recently served as Milton Center Fellow in Poetry at Newman University. John’s poetry has won a variety of awards, and may be read in a wide swath of journals. His first full-length collection, Rebekah Orders Lasagna, is available from Woodley Press, Washburn University. Rebekah Orders Lasagna was a finalist for the William Rockhill Nelson Award.
       He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Butler College, where he initiated the Oil Hill Reading Series, bringing in poets such as Albert Goldbarth, Jeanine Hathaway, and Bryan Dietrich.
       Recently John has returned to an old interest, songwriting; he has studied formally under Don Koke, and is a semi-regular at the Singer/Songwriter Circle in Wichita. As of this writing, he awaits the release of his first C.D., “The Mystery of Love.”
       John is married to fiction writer Catherine Dryden.

The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.
—Ecclisiastes 4.5

Your mind, red-faced and screaming, cries
From the dinosaur light and the blazing flower
At four in the morning, turns up the shower
To “Skald” and severs the beast from its promise.

In the garage, cats rest until death gathers
Their little white blooms. Their shapes linger on,
Glide from our mouths like cartoon balloons,
Or the frost that accompanies speech in winter.

Here in our hospital, nobody sees
How a sliver of goose flesh, miracle-cured,
Lies on your tongue, a new-coined word,
Or how mopped hallways beckon like thin ice.

Hosts to each other, we’ve learned to rely
On smoldering unguents to glorify
The least glint of our bodies, nasty
As God, sanctus our brawl of belly-

Flesh beneath the white sheet’s blue starch,
Stiff as a tablecloth. We repose
Like two after-images, no purpose
But palliative, hungry for touch.

I have the result, but I do not yet know how to get it.
—Carl Friedrich Gauss

Why not indulge her dear vice, calculate
This reclusive planet’s sun-bound loop,
The difficult orbit of sincere delight
Whose ellipses could have perplexed Laplace himself?
And where lies bright-eyed Heaven’s white dwarf?
Hidden, behind Ceres, from the telescope?

All of this arithmetic’s the sport
To cadge an infant, an unrestrained sublime
When a Gauss-brained boy’s too mazy to resort
To the logarithmic tables he’s memorized.
His numbers lie – stark, memorialized –
Blinking through the interstellar grime.

The laws of gravitation indicate
A resting-place for non-Euclidean clods.
With integers, he tallies the times his mate
Performs an eclipse with some butcher’s son.
He sums it up as classic imperfection,
Counts it on his fingers, just like God’s.