Melanie Jennings Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose creative work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, and other literary magazines. A former restaurant critic for Willamette Week, Melanie has written about food, music, theater, and books for a variety of outlets. She lives in Oregon, where she is constantly working on a novel. Find her @mjennings26 on both Substack and Instagram.

Travel, Goals, Experiments | Poetry

Melanie Jennings

Travel The jellyfish lay flat on the beach, wiped out from the journey. First, she was in Japan, then Ecuador, now here, somewhere south of Tijuana, judging by the tide’s flavor. There’d been an earthquake recently, and another on the way. She tasted that too, an ashy note. Jellyfish are terrific gourmands, something most people don’t know. Real connoisseurs some of them. Her mother, a Peruvian by birth, made a...