Tonight, under Mars’s marquee,
there’s nothing to want on the morrow.
Martins soar over dark marigolds.
Mariachis & mariculturalists play marbles
with schoolmarms; telemarketers & samaritans
dine on calamari & marmalade under tamarisk.
In nocturnal margins, a narrow pharaoh
marshals markdowns on the marjoram,
attempts to outsmart marsupials.
No use maneuvers, to demarcate
mar from marrow. For you, I marcel
my hair, study the grammar of marabous,
shrug off the fumaroles of marriage,
the smarmy remark, the rigmarole.
My Sweet Marshmallow, Smartass,
I’m in for the marathon. Come, be my marmoset.
Lie with me on this pockmarked moraine.
Dad’s building evidence in the empirical world.
Yellow sulphur in the yew hedge, ginger fritillary,
green darner—who is he to judge inconsequence?
Something momentous will happen, but not today,
the present banked and sandbagged
by repeating proofs of the ordinary.
Winged theorems of a fly over morning melon,
orderly stack of Thursday newsprint,
inky striations on a smudged thumb.
The body its own warm logic.
Sac of breaths, cask of withered jewels—
a safe for breaking and entering another day.
I’m new at being old,
up from my nap of hummingbirds,
my grit larder, my feathered griefs.
Days distend
into a flummox of years,
and memory is a pool
of eels and sea wrack,
old schoolwork, a child’s
silver porringer.
Today I will porcupine myself,
makeshift a shroud
from the dictionary’s torn spine,
and prepare to take
my mother’s place,
first in line.
Brother, time unravels you.
Did your eyes have color, ever?
Hush, night frogs in the pond.
Basho and Buson still whisper
under shadows of japonica.
You never hooked a minnow,
never wore a yellow rain slicker.
Still, I reliquary you
in my mind’s eye,
little inchworm,
aquifer the dowser missed,
old footnote in a family story
broken sparrow anecdote without breath
and I the last to tell.
All children to this, with few exceptions.
Once I stuffed wild herbs in my mouth,
dissected moldy dolls in the drainage ditch.
One flying pig looks like another, he always said.
Salting his butter, looking for an escape clause
in every sentence, death or not.
So what if the jib swung out and brained the narrator?
Once, he was a continent;
now he’s a crumpled handkerchief.
By dipstick and laundromat shall I steer
my starship deeper into spacetime.
Suffer not the lilies of the field.
The constellations wheel in the sky,
their coordinates deeply suspect.
© 2018. The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University.
All work copyright of their respective authors.