I get that, like, bees make a bush loud.
Something in the middle, like, won’t hold
Another thing up. Shakespeare, like, knew
About the heart, the hart, and, like, the hard
Life we all, like, lead, or something. I hear you
When you say that a wren-free tree in winter means
Like death. But, like, what do I like about it all?
I guess it’s, like, the way the men in Lord of the Rings
Tell me their names, and who they’re, like, the son of.
How Rhianna hits the high notes, and, like, looks right
At me through the mp3. Gaga, like, getting on with her life.
How I get from day to day and find my way back out
Into the likeness of my own fine shape and form.
But I’m, like, in flux, I know, and raw and stumbling-sweet.
I text and make the world. I, like, am also unknowable. I tweet.

A winner of the River Styx International Poetry Contest, runner-up for the Iowa Review Fiction Prize and Finalist in The Starcherone Prize, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Prize and the Paul Bowles Fiction Award, Jesse Waters is a recipient of a NC Artist’s Grant to attend the Vermont Studio Center, and is currently Director of both the Bowers Writers House at Elizabethtown College and the West Chester University Poetry Center. Jesse’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, and has appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Adirondack Review, Coal Hill Review, The Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, River Styx, Slide, Story Quarterly, Southeast Review, Sycamore Review and others. His first collection of poems Human Resources was published by Inkbrush Press in 2011; his first collection of short fiction So Let Me Get This Straight was released by Paycock Press in Feb. of 2018.