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Like a lonely pawn, your penmanship appears in a letter in a drawer. How else can I call you up but holding this? Your dim light roomier with my blood held to the circuit.
What is the pleasure of this letter in my hands? You write, my whole life. I say you write, present tense, as if your writing it was the now that just slipped off, the wall I bend my vision around.
All I have is paper, the long stem of a cursive S to hang from here in this hunt, an ocean.
Again, what is it—this pleasure?
…the Double / of the object is that I desire it, said Susan Howe.
Could my attention fatten history, make the sentence—the surface, my experience of time itself—more robust, bubbling up, saying itself to the ear in my sleep?
Wife
On a map I touch the city in the story of the journey in which you stop recording my name, so I look to myself like fog in a mirror. Glass-lit and worshipful, everywhere to kneel—and you think loudly only of your stomach.
Penelope, I wondered in the caves. Penelope on shore, Penelope in the twisting eddies. Revolt is such a small voice. A flag shaking, the vivid green of a pinion won’t keep you alighted.
So, I get baroque: Medusa dangling Perseus’s dumb head. My arms loll out of proportion for no-love. I get imperfect pearl, pray aloud on the cold and send it in the mail: wife is a luxuriant field, and wife is a girth. Husband is disarmed, thin as a myth I’d never author, as you can’t sneak up on yourself.
And yet, I wait here feeling tall in the spine. Gather branches to burn and warm you tomorrow. The moon swells big in my throat like a promise.
Sara Renee Marshall hails from Colorado. She is the author of a chapbook, Affectionately We Call This The House (Brave Men Press). Her work has appeared in Everyday Genius, Octopus, CutBank, OmniVerse, Colorado Review, the NewLights Press chapbook series, and elsewhere. Sara teaches at University of Georgia where she's pursuing a PhD.