all this time we were seated for our own share of the light now it doesn’t matter how much furrows are set in our butts today I unthink suicide I uncork my body into the arms of morning sun & fall back into a garden of lilies I’m the chips & also the ketchup I eat the sweetness out of myself into myself here it is: the delicate art of unspooling in a birdlike motion I love the way my body loves me we think we’d walk into a …
I lean behind the wet leaves to pluck what I think I see— a wild black raspberry. Thirty years of picking distills in my hand; I’m confident I can eat what I find. I lift the vine above my head to shake away the rain, pull off the dark caps lined in honeycomb. Leave the rest for next week or after. I hear myself, decades back, prickling at the thorns I’m happy to know as I retreat. A mile on I lick my palm where the stain lasts, a useful dye. Sandra Marchetti is the author of two …
In the goldening late afternoon sun, screeching green loros fly from tree to eucalyptus tree. A boy rides a white horse bareback down a dirt street. · Now cricket song swells in the rose-brushed twilight reflected upon the steady river. There chiquilines (children) skins sun-toasted, still play in the waters. . The near-full moon whitens the dense brush. Frogs have joined that grillo chorus. . In the midst of this starry night, I hear the sputtering …
We took down the bird-feeder Because they told us to, even though None of the birds here are sick yet— We live in a period of excessive Pestilence, which sounds like a metal band Or the beginning of a tongue-twister Except it’s not so hard to say, Only to live in, red thread struggling Against passage through a needle’s eye, The space usually occupied by a rich man But they’ve all shot themselves into space, As if we aren’t already there; money In uncountable currency makes black Death savory, …
Fixer Upper I’ve always felt a need to be a fixer. When I was young, and my father an alcoholic, I went to the library and discovered that making meals with carbohydrates would lessen the desire to drink. I made lots of spaghetti. Huge bowls of mashed potatoes. Freshly baked cookies. Then he wouldn’t come home for supper. Later, I’d hear him stumble home late at night, almost morning, puking in the bathroom, cursing up the stairs as he stumbled to bed. Finding apricot pits to cure Mom’s …
too busy living to hit record I dread the day your side-mouth impressions wry as a country song slip from my ridges and you with freckles real or imagined those teeth so honest eyes like a lightning strike a fox’s cackle, wicked and you the thinker in profile long fingers on knowing hands the whir-click of hidden clockwork I want to collect every likeness in my pocket an expression like coinage set in copper what if twenty years gone you are burnt …