Jordan Corley: 5 Poems
Say Cheese!
Corners of a mouth pull wide under hard light,
skin thinning where it’s asked to hold.
Hello? Where’s your smile?
Pigment presses into pores,
sealing the surface with a brittle gloss.
Teeth show. Saliva threads.
Hold it.
Face learns the shape it’s allowed.
Jaw locked. Cheeks lifted.
Nerves stutter, then go quiet.
Good girl—
that’s better.
Beneath the color, something pulses,
but body keeps still.
Breath stays shallow.
Smile working hard.
Flash.
What cracks doesn’t show.
What rips is practiced away.
Say Cheese!
Picture keeps
what face cannot.
She’s not a child
Soot dances across the eyes,
sweat sliding down the spine. Fever
on the back of the neck, but it’s too cold
to be comforting, even now,
when heat pulls you under.
Sirens wail in the men’s bathroom, filtered through tile,
lost in distance. Something
grows inside your belly. It’s not a baby.
She’s not a child.
Pink sweatshirts, edges singed,
ripped thread on the brink of a breakdown—
just buy a new one. No value.
You were never emotional anyway.
Cardboard boxes line the closets,
fill the gaps with clean clothes,
nothing burned enough to miss.
The TV screen flickers:
two people died today.
She says give it up
through a bottle of red wine.,
eyes fixed somewhere behind you
She’s not a child.
Gunshots sound where your thoughts should be.
Some sounds you’ll always remember, still you
wonder how you got here—
don’t kiss the corpse
that pretends to fly.
You know she’s already dead.
Secret square friends
The last of the white squares dissolves into the dark throat
of the sink. A goodbye you know will never be permanent,
but a goodbye nevertheless. Coins in the back pocket hold little
value when you’ve graduated to two blue ovals and one red,
stitched-up circle. The color helps you remember when
monsters were only in fairytales, when blood only
pooled in glass pipes. “When you’re frozen, turn the boiler
on.” The world spins a little faster on goodbye days,
everything seems a little brighter, hibernation feels
a little closer. The neighborhood cat’s screaming
pierces your heart a little deeper, and the weight of
lifting your limbs feels less like a formality and more
like an inevitable reality. Find a forever home and the
questions will go away—dull into something more
palatable. A moment measured in days brought you
here. A quiet argument with a label and a white coat.
Don’t forget to eat your medicine before the monsters
come out from hiding.
head rush
pour one more coffee spin taste
of chocolate milk and iron new
spatula and a pan fry hiss a
lung in steam
my blood waters animals
not people
horror ends in the hospital
forgot to seal my name in wax
why is everything
Red?
when ruined
High in the hum of the bathroom light
where the body folds into a cocoon of sick,
mascara runs—
black threading into the sheets.
Such pretty eyes.
See how she’s faking.
Look how well she performs.
Eyelids heavy, she leans over the bowl,
black residue bleeding into new tattoos.
What a shame,
he will say
to ruin the towels
with something as honest as blood.
Jordan Corley is a writer based in Busan, South Korea, where she is pursuing a Master’s degree in Korean Language and Literature at Pusan National University. Her work explores themes of psychology, feminism, and cross-cultural literary traditions. Her writing has appeared in magazines including Eunoia Review, Wingless Dreamer Publisher, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and her second chapbook, Something Golden, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in 2026.