Thrush Poetry Journal
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Michael Marberry

Love Poem

            – after Andrei Tarkovsky

Darling, if you go, I must writhe inside this excuse

of a body like a man stripped of every oneirology.

I must pace the sidewalks, greeting each passerby

with lewd and angry gestures, and embarrass myself.

I must point at what I ought to know the names of,

asking:  What is this? and What is this? again.  Darling,

I should’ve been a troglodyte tucked in a dank grotto.

Please stay, where we have touched the same things:

this bed, this faux chinabowl you held to your lips,

this floor on which we both have stepped, barefoot.

If you go, all the earth dries up and dies.  If you go,

you must be the world’s last and cruelest spectacle.




Love Poem

If ought to say I want you, then I won’t.
                                    If quick to howl I’m sorry, then I’m not.
If fuck’s self-same as feeling, but it ain’t.
                                    If enters every room like it’s the worst.
If is.  If waits to hear a door slam shut.
                                    If and with you.  If just to hear a name.
If just to tell to me what it don’t mean.
                                    If places been before and then forgot.
If fingered buttons, fingered belt loops.
                                    If laugh.  If Darling till the belly aches.
If what’s that Darling never was to you.
                                    If filled to the brim but not flowed over.
If to brush one’s hair behind one’s ear.
                                    If to taste, a first time, something sweet.




Love Poem

Darling dumbfucked  Darling grumpers  Darling
goddess of regret and every graywinged whoring

after  longwronged Darling  Darling now newer
now improved a sad song played in chords of D

minor  oft burgled Darling  Darling even oftener
endangered or objectified Darling in the artstuffs

where’s your sexkind’s goldurn hizzouse Darling
if not symbology a permafrost or nympho  anti

rampart Darling our literatures only painting you
a crazy razer of attics and/or raiser of pants tents

Darling have i done no better by you (so doubtful)
Darling have i come some piece hither since being

shit tongued and iffy  i don’t mean to be the ways
i am and am but Darling you are and Darling but




Michael Marberry's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, West Branch, Indiana Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Bat City Review, Guernica, and elsewhere.  Michael earned his MFA at Ohio State University and is currently pursuing his PhD at Western Michigan University.




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