Djelloul Marbrook; Three Poems

A shuddering

Here is not as easy to define as there
where imagination is unimpeded
by immediacy, white noise, hard breathing
and the grunt work of getting along,
but here is the dirigible whose mooring lines
we must let go to lift our moment with us
or else cling to captors and adore them.
There are a million ways to shun this
in favor of that and we must abhor them
in favor of spontaneity so sharp
atoms shudder in its proximity, and then,
only then, we dance with what we glimpse at dusk
or when lightning illuminates the woods.
Meanwhile our hankering to define allures us
to hereafters and hereinafters that suck the blood
from the instant that reaches for our hand
to make a circle in a fey and yet familiar place.

Obscene

I watched her kick the wall for needing repair,
kindred spirit whose sin is being unserviceable.
Break her foot, treacherous wall! Confess
to nothing, not even costing too much. But wait,
her foot's entangled in poison ivy, not Virginia creeper;
that's enough punishment for one day. I'll pretend
to be solicitous, but it's you that has my sympathy,
innocent wall, and if I find any fault with you
it's that you stand in the way of what might be one
to partition us from the object of our longing,
whatever it is, but she wouldn't understand that,
it being so inconvenient. You, surplus to her needs,
stand with me, held up by an invasive species,
not yet allowed to fall down, an object of despair
simply because we require obscene amounts of care.

The suffocating room

A mother wouldn't do this,
not to any woman's child,
unless her demons swallowed his
and she needed to expose her belly
still digesting them, wouldn't,
shouldn't, it doesn't matter
until an explosion more brilliant
than our mother star devours them
and they become pinpricks of light
playing on the skin of innocents
they've yet to meet. Too late,
too late for them all for talk
of sin, redemption, forgiveness,
the usual blather. All that's left
is a sere plain not yet refined
to desert—and an ineradicable sob.

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Djelloul Marbrook’s first book of poems, Far from Algiers, won Kent State University's Stan and Tom Wick Prize in 2007. He is the author of four poetry books and five books of fiction. His fifth book of poems, Riding Thermals to Winter Grounds, is forthcoming from Leaky Boot Press, UK, in late 2016. He lives in the mid-Hudson Valley with his wife Marilyn. 

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