Marsha de la O
(USA)
Against the Death of Language
Resist it, you wordfreaks
you blue-streaks
you jokers, canters, midnight ranters
you rhymers, swervers
fruity and nutty, happy-go-slutty—
resist—you mute ones, creators, nest-shapers
you carvers and bakers
hemp and banana-leaf paper-makers
let us inscribe
words as porous and riddled as sleep
Oh text, remember us,
oh myriad forms
scrolls and tomes
shouts and moans
black as handfuls of earth
body of matter stripped of all prologue
body of work, body of thought
bristle of tracks carved on a tablet
words freaked in a font, gothic and bleak,
letters in choirs pressed close together,
filaments shining,
conjoint
conjugation of song
Go on and say it!
Sing us a ditty. Carve baby a rune in the S of a heron,
chew up the vellum, illuminate the margin, drill down to the mirror
inside the volume
Lexicon and leaflet and manual anon!
Oh, for a fat compendium,
for a thirteen part omnibus,
every glyph, every word Jack,
a highwayman mustered for a stick-up
a loose woman looping her arms round your neck!
Another Dream of Death
as simple as two ring-necked doves
in a winter-bare tree, so close they’re clearly a pair
one flaps away, the other shivers
her feathers and hunkers down on the branch—
after a time she goes too. Or maybe it’s a wound
to my skull, not a bullet, but a shaft struck
down into greasy wet darkness where women
surround me, the King’s women I call them,
who urge without words towards something
final and visceral, what—I don’t know. And once
a blonde crawled toward me under a table
and ravished me with her lip-stick red mouth
but still every morning I refuse,
and walk away into daylight.
I Have Not Said If I Believe
She sprang out of the pine plank table
at Nana’s house, a witch with a rope
around her neck and all the havoc spilling
out encoded in our DNA. I studied
a dipping barometer and felt dirty beneath
my clothes, a bone fingered and sucked.
Mother favored gray for me, not that
it mattered a flip. Elder brother carried
our witch sewn in a vein in his thigh.
I did not think she hammered there.
They set a match to sixteen candles.
She was hung not burnt, he announced,
pressure falling, needle notching
toward dimensions where a witch
is hanging still, her ankles stretched
longer than human, she had six
children, her name was Lydia. He started
the song for ha-ha. Never been kissed,
crooned first brother, lost count, cracked
the other, sally, sally, I muttered while
mother’s mouth goes darker and
tighter. Hurry up and blow. Everyone
laughed when the flames died out.
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Black Hope, by Marsha de la O, won the New Issues Poetry Prize from the University of Western Michigan and an Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has been anthologized in Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (Ballantine), Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (Greenhouse Review Press), and the poetry workshop handbook One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form (Lynx House Press). A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she has published in journals such as Barrow Street, Passages North, Solo, and Third Coast. She and her husband, poet Phil Taggart, publish the poetry journal Askew. They are currently working on a documentary on poet/publisher Glenna Luschei, founder of Solo Press.