Gambler’s Anonymous
About the call in the night that woke me,
the clank and tinsel of slot machines, gunning
lasers on the other end, no voice but my own
“hello? hello?” echoing back from the afterlife,
a dream now fifteen years stale, the rumor
I couldn’t shake: our lives recorded on a single
reel, some cosmic VHS tape, that crinkles across
each private confession and public heartbreak,
played back to God & Co. the moment after death,
when all would be revealed, and we’d find ourselves
returned at once to every good time, sunning our feet
on the dashboard (some small part of me awake
as she stole through my room for my meager stash
of dollars), except for mine stuck in rewind,
missing and missing her pocket dials.
Susan, 1979
For Elena
She is watery and small,
leaning, to the left of the camera’s
focus, awash in sepia. Gauze of light,
buzz of summer haze. Cicadas
certainly, the dull drone
of fluorescent tubes.
My mother in a knit vest,
between cruel husbands.
Out of frame, one behind
in an unreported past. The other
(my father) on the album’s next page.
How storybook: her guarded smile.
The unspeakingness
of photos. How closed like a case,
like a casket. Like a case. How truth
becomes truth when it lids over.
Your mother was also a Susan,
we discover long after I
cracked the fence and gave you
the broken post, my palms
splintered and glittering. Your father,
the geologist, talks mounds over dinner.
A man, tall like my father. A generation
trained on hard blue corners
and crisp divides.
At the funeral, she was small again, a girl
licking opals with other girls. We learn
the miner’s kiss: the tongue, that other
instrument of sight, parts clouds to see
the silica spheres. The geod keeps secret
its iridescent symmetries.
How insistent, this oar
against the loam. Let me be as
soft as clay breaking in the light.
Auditory Hallucination
Night never comes. The engines, low to the ground, unsheathe
slick over asphalt. Salt cakes the snow, cakes the road
washed to bathwater in headlight beams. A century
rumbles past in a chorus of gutturals. I wake to speech behind
the static of the white noise machine: The program
you’ve chosen has ended. The flat voice of a woman
repeating makes a vertical surface. A pane of glass
that hovers in open air. A brain will find a pattern when
a pattern isn’t there. Human faces in whorls of
tree bark, in our clothes discarded on the floor. How once,
we made a room with just our voices, the fabric
of your breath rumpling the sheets. Night never
comes and there are worlds where the thrum of roots
parting soil is deafening, a density of birds swarming
artificial light. There are worlds where time is not a tower
but a calving beneath the surface. In the dull light, I drift to sleep
while the sound of the water opens.
The Tiniest Piece of the Mirror Is Always the Whole Mirror1
You are safe now in the small room
of your life, pasta spirals
on the boil, your hands stained
with the perfume of sliced lemon.
Wind slams a screen door,
but you are safe in the room
you’ve filled so carefully with pieces
of yourself. You admit you’re waiting
still. You feel your life hovering
just outside your life, a rain of silt
tapping the glass. The week’s hard
edges crowd out the days. You learn
to freeze what won’t keep. Your breath
shows traces of last week’s lipstick
on the drinking glass. Steam away
your headaches with hot showers.
Listen to the sound of your own
breathing. A door slams open
then shut. In their colander,
nests of spirals cloud the air.
Silver State Ghazal
“The landscape looked familiar. Its familiarity was an illusion, a ruse.
What looked familiar, to our desert-less eyes, was repetition.”
—Brandon Shimoda
A small gathering of dust. The pilgrims abandon their civilization,
trailing ropes across the plain—the wild calls for a new civilization.
At the foot of the dam, tent spikes corrode, coffee tins sift sand.
Under the makeshift church, the graves of an old civilization.
In the boneyard, the lightbulbs ground to glitter still glow,
a particle film over every wet eye in this civilization.
High noon, no shadow. In the dull itching heat, he folds her wrist
to hear its snap. Naming is the first act of any civilization.
Gunning trucks shake the yucca crouched over the basin.
Roots finger the caliche shelf, crystal brine below our civilization.
What remains? The rows of their nails, the white flats of salt, the bathtub
rings pink around the lake: a lake before it was called civilization.
Say we are not anxious of origins. We conquered time, we broadcast
the implosion. Ruins are for the scattered of a lost civilization.
With all the light here, the stars wash out, but the heart
muscles on, the tired pulse of our civilization.
- The Tiniest Piece of the Mirror is Always the Whole Mirror: Title from Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector. ↩︎
Marlo Starr is a writer and an assistant professor of English at Wittenberg University. Her poems have appeared in The Hopkins Review, The Threepenny Review, The Shore, Berfrois, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere.
The Marbled Sigh 