Marie Scarles
Collage and erasure
New Year
January 1
I walk past the silent cathedral
Plastic tarp wrapped around the empty windows
a voice echoes and warps in my eardrums
hollow dumpster pond fronds cattails night reeds fens
I know what strangeness I am after
waxy light against the chainlink fence like honeycomb
a stray wire blows, taps against trash
back in bed I scroll through app chats, ads for meditation mats
night’s theater swinging headlights through the apartment
I want to give a stranger night's eros
I want to love a thing into existence, suspend
the monotony of logic at the year’s crown
_______________
What I want out of language, I want out of the daily trudge to the office
I want the underbelly, the dark side ice, cold flame, strange night
where I am Other and reason is banished to day
I want to track landscapes below the concrete: ten million years of the earth and its river valleys
Colorado, Columbus, Connecticut, Mississippi
to the tributary that holds my name.
_______________
Fine—this, then, is the “river of desire”
formless, without a place where the mouth meets the sea
no mountains for it to stream down from
I am scrubbed of illusions daily.
A thousand spark plugs short out in me
they stink of burnt wire, the growl of an engine, cut
_______________
Feeling weird and the moon was full last night
pale wispy cloudlings brushed past my window grate
warm winter dusk
I run myself around the park, trying to let out
let off some of this steam, can’t get off
I keep hearing this line
artless is my heart
Hundreds of faces flash past on the apps, heading
west west west west west west west
one travels east
and then west again.
I don’t answer right swipes right away
You’re awful says my mind
always right on time
_______________
January 8
Beside the bed on the windowsill
wax rings accumulate over woodgrain
last night’s spilled candles
I step over it, onto the fire escape, rust staining my hands as I climb
unsteady over the neighbor's apartment, past their boxed-in tight.
At the peak of the night I wish that I might taste like plums
fresh from the vine
I might make chins dribble with desire
or at least write myself into existence
under seeds of light
_______________
This, then, is the trouble
I am writing to no one
No one is there when I speak,
No one asks me, what do you think
But I keep thinking anyway
that someone might ask
for my speech or desires
I want to want to extinguish the flame, but I’d rather burn up in it
Scatter like a pack of ashes, like a plastic bag
caught up in the grasp of the flame
To console me, a memory
a chance to live again
like when my ex-lover put down the backseat
parked the car on the point near the jetty
I burned my knees twisting around him
the hard scrubby trunk of a juniper
_______________
January 15
It is the moon
it is always the moon
stitched icily into the blue-black
like a sliver of god's glass
its disk surprises me from the east side
buildings stacked along the block
like a dozen teeth sprung up
from the concrete. Spring
is nowhere in sight, winter gives nothing back
How stark and raw the city is tonight.
The neighbors button their coats,
wear hats, ward off the cold
but the draft won’t quit leaking around the window frames
whispering cold into my hat.
Soon it will be my second year alone,
though I’d rather sleep solo than rest in a stranger’s hold
Still, there is the moon.
Scooped craters I only can imagine from our rock.
I think of the night in the west, its deep black strutted through
by stars—I think of a mountain pass, of horses stood still
in a slope-side pasture, and how language there
spoke to me
I can't remember what it said but I knew it knew me
It held me in its cratered hands
Marie Scarles is a writer, artist, and educator whose work investigates the ways that humans, animals, and environments co-create each other, among other things. She’s also an MFA candidate in creative writing, a part-time lecturer, and an interdisciplinary research fellow at Rutgers University–Camden. Her work appears in Entropy, Yes Poetry, SIREN Journal, Tricycle, and elsewhere. She writes from a plant-filled office in West Philadelphia. Tweet with her @mscarles.