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Showing posts with label Jacqueline Markowski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jacqueline Markowski. Show all posts

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Lateral Currencies and Liberties

by Jacqueline Markowski

Our hair was long, tangled, smoky. Lipstick
and mascara stains, unraveling
sheets. After the 2am migration,
bars closed, where could we possibly go
from there? I knew you let small truths slip
past big moments before we came
back to my house, to my bed. I also knew resistance
would not harmonize in still water. Your kiss,
a peach, your lips fat with directives.
My mouth became a warm candle of images—
what daylight might bring to our side-
show. Words didn’t fail, they were swallowed
by lateral grief and stretched currencies. We were hungry,
plain. The measure of symmetry has always been
a grey area, really. What’s one more complication
among women like us? Morning
brought a continuum, a babbling of days
and years. A need for smooth water will
find us again, together or not, but still,
a living language mapped and navigated
by our kind.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Half Day In Moon-Tone Room

by Jacqueline Markowski

We lie together never really
knowing who's there between,
or within, or even why, but there,
in that room, moments break open
into tiny little spasms of liquid—

tears and sweat— viperous guilt.
The moment we reach the place we can't
define we are sudden. The sounds of the birds
screech in and out of the lost stillness
we've created—  here?  Where
we are least passive, least sedentary,
of all places to make one
quiet consciousness of two
racing alligators.

As the awkwardness breaths heavily
upward in the smoky room, white
walls darken like wood paneling,
pupils dilate, become round moons
absorbing each other's shine,
each other's light—
and then they are one
Vermont moon.

Gravity rakes fiercely with its waves, the feelings
that shook my nerves, offering up
to the beach (with its reject
sand castles and moldy, forgotten
beach bags) all losses of
conscientious objection,
paradoxical notions
incased in glowing antique renditions
of nature verses nurture.

Our moon rang out a silent truth,
spilling dialectics
of truth in/honesty of
emotion; a wave of premonitory
nostalgia swept us both
under the rugged, hateful tide.
I could feel it, like salt water slapping
at my ten year old back (sun-kissed,
damaged; but young skin heals nicely)
pulling at my torso
just at the moment
you hugged onto me quietly,
the man in the moon is
thinking about it, too,
you told me.

What you didn't say,
what I didn't think
ahead to was that,
inevitably, this violent, sibilant tide
will turn its sights to the next light
house, our nautical parable
interpolated amid
the skeletons and the other
forgotten jewels.