3 poems by Sara Renee Marshall

from THE LANDSCAPES WERE IN MY ARMS

1

The history of industry tells me more than this archive of confession. My legs are forgotten against the wind of a train, nowhere and going. A train so fast it outpaces the tread of an eye. Gone from earth, the season, measured in machine rhythm. You’re not here. Work is not here, not the object but to chase a craving—the caveat of mystery spelled in dim meadow ambling off. Hope lusty as teeth remembered on my thigh. A riddled grave, a specter seizes the shoulders of Delacroix’s orphan off screen.

2

On loop, this play of modesty—you calling the house a pile of bricks. Forever the image of rectangles stacked without mortar, little figurines threatened beneath them. A dark stain back-lit by the traveling sun. I don’t know if it’s rising or falling, since this isn’t episodic but remote. When the little girl I was thinks of me I’m driving. She’s half right about the picture revising itself. Out of nowhere a steeple traumatizes this skyline. Landscape is so wrongly fed by the drama of devotion.

3

Maybe, like a ghost, like the view from a train, that life must pass through this one. Cut and strained through my sleep, the candle’s flame loses its untrained body eventually. I send one eye on an errand: to memorize the crazed anemones sunned onto the lake. But where there is light, there is the chromatic trick interrupting. Blood fucked out of me flowering on the sheets. That won’t stop me, you said. So I sleep with my head at the foot of the bed. I want to flush the luster from narrative.

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Sara Renee Marshall hails from the American southwest. Her writing has appeared in Dear Sir, Colorado Review, The Volta, Octopus, CutBank, OmniVerse and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, Affectionately We Call This The House (Brave Men Press). Sara lives, teaches and writes mostly in Denver, Colorado.