poem 18: On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

On the Last Ferry Home: Moving Over the Mississippi

I hear my city at war,
or maybe I’m hearing
my own heart like a war

with its million ammunitions,
million missing limbs, its slow
roaring movement through loss.
I was the barrel of a shotgun.

I was the wrong way out of town.
I was a lone moving animal,
trying to find the door to your house.

In times like this I try to ignore
the numbers, the body counts,
the orphaned young. But this war
makes me a listener so I understand

the crashing, my body moving:
a mistake. Let me warn you:
I bring the hurricanes, the forest

fires, the non-God fearing baptisms of the earth
and they take me in their arms like a familiar stranger.
As a moving funeral in this drunken city,

I leave bright trinkets in my wake.
As a moving funeral in all the other cities,
I leave the already worn land, the dry brush, the barely lit

match. I leave the ghost towns behind,
later drive past the washed out houses,
the burnt branches of that mountain.

I wish I could say those skeleton lands
have never moved me.

-marlo barrera

june-september 2010

Poem 13

In your absence it was my job
to keep the dog from digging

in the yard. But I was rabid too.
I was in a fever and lock jawed
and so insatiably thirsty
I drank
and drank
and drank
‘til I could feel it move inside me
like my very own tide;

you were a strong moon.
In that horrifying dream
I am the one destroying.
I have a tide in my belly then too
which moves my whole body.

In this waking life
the rabid me follows my mouth,
my nose which can’t understand either,
but night after night brings me to this same bed.

*
Our dog is learning: digs,
avoiding the flowering weeds
you couldn’t help but to love.

--marlo barrera

june 2010

Romantic Dogs in Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009!

It got in there!

Here is the link.

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