Marina Read Weiss
Self Portrait With Semicolons
I wake in dark uncoupling
from your elbows and knees
to write
[ hot sweet immolation
in the blood
; glancing
in collusion with knives]
; your pack of Camel Lights
; a path to seeing breath
[to be continued
after these messages]
; contempt and
death are uncouplings
; the wetland colludes with skunk
cabbage, leases musks. I slop
my mother’s borscht between my teeth
; drive you wrecklessly through the homely
parkway dawn to a former factory where
gloved in latex you handle and spawn contagions
; ungloved bite into a sandwich.
[how I would like to believe in tenderness
; the face of the effigy
gentled by candles
bending on me
; in particular
its mild eyes]
Marina Read Weiss edits Explosion-Proof magazine, her work is published or forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review,
poetryfoundation.org, Canteen, The Montreal Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ink Node, Caper, dislocate, folly, Paper Darts, Brink, and elsewhere.
Return to November 2012 Edition
I wake in dark uncoupling
from your elbows and knees
to write
[ hot sweet immolation
in the blood
; glancing
in collusion with knives]
; your pack of Camel Lights
; a path to seeing breath
[to be continued
after these messages]
; contempt and
death are uncouplings
; the wetland colludes with skunk
cabbage, leases musks. I slop
my mother’s borscht between my teeth
; drive you wrecklessly through the homely
parkway dawn to a former factory where
gloved in latex you handle and spawn contagions
; ungloved bite into a sandwich.
[how I would like to believe in tenderness
; the face of the effigy
gentled by candles
bending on me
; in particular
its mild eyes]
Marina Read Weiss edits Explosion-Proof magazine, her work is published or forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review,
poetryfoundation.org, Canteen, The Montreal Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ink Node, Caper, dislocate, folly, Paper Darts, Brink, and elsewhere.
Return to November 2012 Edition