Barely alive
(or standing) in the low grass of updates
Fort-nine
deaths, feeding a future baby with my present breast
I’m told this
is common; I am quiet, smudged grey amid racket
between
neighborhood birds and the full tilt of quickening
What is the
feeling of a trap without its trappings
The scale of
sadness shrinks small as a sentence
Let us now leave tragedy and move to
foolishness
where we can
better file ourselves
on the planet
of passion, bullet-red and apologizing after
Metaphorical
light strikes. The mythical warrior can kill or rescue
The horn can
gore or the laborer shoulders a wheel
And where in
the sky is the mother disguised
as animal or
brutalist, as flight or equinox or map
*
In this
sequence, I am rooted in the land
Here, a
distributor of gold pastures, here, inspector
of ponds. The
harvest lover, a guardian of granaries
Still, TV
shudders. A faint stream of dust and gas
spiraled arms
and a glowing middle. Observed
by radio waves,
sloughing solid memory at dawdling speed—
the black scowl of night seemed to
rebuke me
My family is a
pulse that can quit
Yet where should I go?
I can promise
the full melt
of my golden
fleece into a song to keep alive by
or lend us to a
good wind
The word is a
place to wander but never
be abandoned.
In the word, not lucky
but sprawled on
planks of an actual boat
From the moss,
I think this is Washington
*
Note how little I periled
though my real
arms tangle before you
Poor Penelope,
too witnessed
Poor Jocasta
Yet I planned nothing, and considered
nothing
I wake up sick
about the beauty of Medea
whose bad fate
will never breed a namesake
Blood: does it
curdle? Can it spoil before birth?—
a candle guttering to waste in the
socket
So often the
child is the event, his mother, simple
in her limit,
just breathing, just attending graves like a ghost
*
If I’m honest,
the main mode of
communication
is memory or maybe telepathy
networked with
chicken wire
an electric and
uneven ground
I speak to the
city as a density or lush current
I can visit,
step in and step out
If it’s
beautiful, I’ve made it so
though I’ve
often married a monolithic building
to my
imagination, to its gilded cornice and inimitable difference
Something as
common as a dwelling goes up while we sleep
We could use a
great deal more frankness. For example:
it is both
miraculous and mundane to build a person—
I departed on the strength of this
outline
I sip a glance
at the plants on the sill
and in these
final days feel proud like an unglamorous emperor
Sara Renee Marshall comes from the Arizona desert and Colorado's high plains. She holds a degree in Political Science and an MFA in Poetry, both from University of Colorado. She is the author of a chapbook,
Affectionately We Call This The House (Brave Men Press). Her writing has appeared in
Interrupture,
Octopus,
jubilat,
OmniVerse,
Everyday Genius,
Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Sara is pursuing a PhD at University of Georgia. With Thomas and Rosa Bernadette, Sara lives, teaches, and writes in Athens, Ga.
the Tuesday poem is curated by
rob mclennan
