Poem 6: Locusts

Locusts: A Mutually Attracted Species

I am thinking maybe here could be a chance for the Rocky Mountain locust to have some god-fearing return like a hunger, raise hell here. Eighteen seventy-four: twelve point five trillion insects, twenty-seven point five million tons and hungry too, no, starving. Two hundred million dollars in crop damages in the west. Left the place barren like a handful of sand. Left everyone hungry. There was already a drought. Everyone was already hungry. The sugars in the stalks made the locusts want though.

Thirty years later, farmers had a hand in the extinction of them so that plowing now seems dangerous and secure so that North America is the only populated continent without a major locust. We didn’t save a single one. What it must have felt like to shed. What it must have felt like rejecting a body. Here, I have spent too many nights making decisions, my own body wrapped around a toilet.


-marlo barrera, november 2009

Poem 5, Dead Bees

This has been my first sight of bees
in months after Virginia, in the woods
near the pond where they took to endure
the heat. These two I carried with me
in a paper bag said,
                                    Marlo Barrera
                                    DEAD BEES
I could hear their bodies
against the paper. I could
hear their bodies.



Later, I held the bees
in the palm of my left hand
and walked home to you.

It was the streetlights that made
their bodies glow and my palm endured
the heat as a city block might.

I missed you terribly. The night was cool
but the bees were dead still.
I thought how best we would preserve
them. Last year this time I didn’t know
you and now I’m bringing these bees to you, a gift.





-marlo barrera, november 2009

Poem 4, Sonnet

Sonnet

After watching the video of your lover
sleeping with a man, first you wondered
why it had taken you so long to realize
it wasn’t you you had been watching,
rather some bastard she brought to your bed,
some son-of-a-bitch who didn’t even have
the dignity to smooth out the sheets afterward
or wash his hands before using your house phone
to call who-knows-who. Sitting there, watching
the video with volume this time, you hear the way she goes
into everything with such enthusiasm; you resign yourself
and second you decide maybe it’s unreasonable

to expect much more. Third, you put on a pot of tea,
get out two mugs and wait for her to come home.




--marlo barrera
september 2009

Poem 3, You, Birch

You, Birch

If I were
a mushroom,
I would be
the scaber stalk
bolete which does not
keep well and which begins
dying as soon as it leaves
the birch it grew
from. No bolete
is poisonous except
for the red ones
that stain blue.

I would not
stain but would be
the closest to red
without being red.

The mushroom grows from the roots
but I think if I were one, I might grow
close to the bark, some dried up place,
to deceive. I’m not saying I’ve done nothing,
more like my want for you is debilitating.



--September 2009
Marlo Barrera

Poem 2

I’ve been wanting to nurse something lately
that’s demanding and unforgiving.
This is not a baby.

In fact, I spent months with a sack of fertilizer on my hip
to realize what a burden just holding the thing would be.

Maybe nursing it would be as a friend
described giving blood—the feeling of refilling
yourself and freshening up
down to the bones.



Maybe it would be a dog
filled with the ghosts of my ancestors.


Maybe it would be a hangover
filled with the ghosts of my ancestors.  

---September 2009

First Post with a Poem Inside

I decided to start trying to keep some of my better poems in one place. Here is where the are going to come and wade about in this mucky muck.

Some of my poems are in a chapbook made by Bennet Bergman and I called On the Savagery of Children or Abby Feeding the Fawn by our own press called Baleen Press (www.baleenpress.blogspot.com). There are places where you can buy it (in Chicago, New Orleans, Bloomington, IN, and Seattle for only five buckaroos!) or you can email and I will send you one.

I think I will do only one poem for each post, but I will do a few posts now.


-------


Elegy

I.
The floor was my mother
once. With the motion

of my whole body, she pressed
at my head, held my back,

let myself be a thing that could relax
like an old sack.


II.
Later: It was as if I was the last of something
only vaguely of value
and you were the last person in this city.

It was dark out.
The street was wet.
I was mud
covered.

You had just washed
your hands. Inside was cold
and smelled of plywood.


III.
A warning: I wasn’t built for swimming,
but crashing through things

so everything/one that ever wanted
to touch me could have the chance.


IV.
Be still.
Let’s keep our bodies
to ourselves
this time.

V.
Nevermind.


VI.
Lover, once lover, ex lover, I swear I’m sorry for those things that exhaled on me. It was the bicycle with its hushed whirrings and how it splattered mud on my back, breathed into my body cement. The way new bed sheets touched my legs and the floor again how she—

Oh fuck. Dear god, no
you, neither of us could even begin to understand.

I’m sorry; I took the bus home on Tuesday. It was packed. The woman next to me caressed my hips and I didn’t object.





---April 2009