Jason Jenn
Jason Jenn creates site-specific immersive experiences that illuminate, educate, and entertain participants. He is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and arts administrator. His works vary in roles as performer, writer, visual artist, director, producer, designer, curator, and filmmaker - creating for exhibition on stage, on screen, on the page, in galleries, and at site-specific locations. In addition to performing dramatic, staged interpretations of other queer poets' work, he frequently writes and performs his own. The aim of his art is to engage the mind conceptually and perhaps tickle the heart, often mixing humor with tragedy and beauty with pain. Works frequently contain sociopolitical and queer-empowered themes. There is keen interest in reexamining familiar archetypes and universally appealing topics, infusing them with a fresh, revelatory perspective. Visuals often take on a dream-like quality, evoking fantastical events and suggesting strange narratives, pulling viewers in for an unexpected and inspiring journey. View a selection of visual and written work at JasonJenn.com


Dear Saint Sebastian,

In the hours when flesh and blood
reverse their natural order with the air,
I see you bound and hanging there:
a body twisted, pierced, and mangled
but your face reveals such enlightenment.

Could it be that in pain’s surrender
you experienced the divine?
Now I wonder could that discovery
be found in the palm of my very own hands
as I tickle the flesh around similar wounds?

If I proffer my fertile kisses
upon the birth canals of your blood,
will a new child emerge into the world,
eyes sparkling with a fresh perspective,
holding the enchantment reborn in bliss?

In every pore that breathes and sweats,
in every glance that seeks and searches,
in every inch of being that surrenders to the next moment,
in every daily death that lingers as we turn a new corner:
you seem to sense it all with an impossible grace.

How? How can that be?
Is that what I find now within your gaze,
that devastates me so?
Is that a sensation
I shall ever know?






© 2022 Jason Jenn
Jason Jenn was a Featured Poet at the November 2022 Second Sunday Poetry Series