Poem 24

For the Mississippi River

I.
Let’s call you thief. When I think of you rustling
through and packing up what you can, you make me
think of my easy surrenders. Terror gets in my bones
easy. I’m the bulb to the frost.

II.
Darling, you tell me south like a well-written love
letter so I think of what holding you would be like:
light as a screen door, violent as the slamming of one.

III.
I try to be more than your landscape of industry,
of barges. Life is hard for all living things and I guess
you’re just the end for some so I go with an open heart

to your broken cities, have built new chambers
in my chest, am cultivating gardens there.

IV.
Since your most recent escape, my decision-making comes
in the form of a blackout stampede like your loose heart.
I take and abandon easily, have learned to regret
nothing, have taken you as my wild mother.

V.
In my poorly constructed letters
I sign under love, yours, always.

-marlo barrera, completed march 2010



*With 2 lines that I think I stole from Bennet Bergman

A poem by Bennet Bergman

This poem is from Bennet's newest chapbook Minor Canyons. All of it is wonderful. I've been carrying it in my bag for the past few weeks.

7. the Men from Town

On Good Friday in San Miguel

we watch the men from town

lynch and burn a paper-mache

effigy of Judas, spangled in

dishrags and bottle rockets.

The Scoundrel, they say,

The Coward, though

on Sunday, dressed in repentance

and new clothes, they lower him

tenderly down.

A Poem from Bennet Bergman

a poem that Bennet wrote. my name is in it so i am proud.

(click to enlarge)

Some Mail Art

In high school sometimes it felt like all I did with my time was make mail art and send it to strangers around the world and I would get things too so now I have a few big boxes of beautiful things sent through the post. I sent things sometimes under my real name, sometimes under this name of Bosco Marx. Coming to Oberlin, I haven't really had the time to do it as much as I had once. Last night was a mail art exhibit here and it got me excited again. The first thing I walked in and saw was the Brain Cell Project which I didn't know much about but in 2006 had gotten a part of the project in the mail. This was exciting. The Recycled Products Coop (I think it was) had a space there with everyone's name and OCMR number on a card so you could anonymously send something to someone. I made three and liked them and decided to put them here before dropping them off. Then I went home and made one for a friend in Chicago that I miss greatly. (I don't think he reads this or knows it exists so I'm not afraid to put it up before I send it). The big one will be folded up and sewn together around the edges. I hope you like them!

(click to enlarge)

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