i put a spell on you
Posted by Marion Smallwood | Filed under Poetry, Print
you’re mine when we waltz inside my head,
i like to watch you there.
you say I have two left feet, so
we dance in circles
around and around and around–
you say
you’re dizzy.
i ask you, spinning, if you see
a thousand girls who look like me.
you say,
“no, there will only ever be one of you.”
but i dream this.
you are not in front of me. we hardly speak.
i know your name sounds like a mouth mid-kiss,
like an arrow hitting
it’s mark.
i like to shrink you to fit inside my fist
on my chin
my head tilted out of an open window.
we touch again, there.
you put your palm on my shoulder
you say i am soft enough.
everything blinks
we get caught in the lashes
you take one, blow it in my direction
make a wish that’s already true.
i think i’m talking about science, not magic.
something clicks.
you pull the wonder from me
find that it’s just like yours.
i pull the skin from your skin,
put it in my drink, a martini
simply for the color–
olive. i sip you.
today was simple.
you made a moon from ‘mine’
i wrote that somewhere on you once. you made it full,
gave it a halo shaped like the rings of my skull.
there are only a few, i am still young.
none of this is true
just to me.
i don’t speak.
hello sounds too much like take me with you.
First lipstick
Posted by Marion Smallwood | Filed under Poetry, Print
And there was a man.
she would put him on her lipstick
lick him just a little off.
“strawberry” she would say,
the smallest seed sliding in between the gap
in her front teeth.
he was
Everywhere.
for a little while
phases
Posted by Marion Smallwood | Filed under Poetry, Print
i don’t have any gaps or openings
your skin can’t cover, just a
mark
left by a
healed
wound, a blemish.
i peel back
the last trace of injury
only i am there under the flap he left,
but i am shining
like i got the moon, in all it’s phases, for teeth.
i show you, you say i’m pretty.
i can believe you now.
i say,
i know i am warm
but you’re right
i haven’t felt it all yet,
wrapped the blanket of my inside around myself
but perhaps i’d simply like to share it
with you
watch a movie—
the fingers of your like
between mine
sometimes, along my back.
i wear my weak
it is pregnant with you.
play me something laborious
give it to me, i’ll keep it in my pocket
like a little red rock
and save it for later.
Manifesto as inspired by Marinetti
Posted by Marion Smallwood | Filed under Print
1. we will suffer creatively, we will find new ways to bleed, we will welcome self-destruction as a means of satisfying our artistic obligations.
2. it is our duty to rebel against sophistication, social constructs and conventionality.
3. up until now, literature has merely glanced into the expanse of creative possibility. we intend to race this space to its ends and upon victory, draw it onward and force its evolution towards absurdity.
4. we affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of the mundane, the detail, the spec, the routine. an edge, a vestige, the sliver of space wedged between misery and invisibility: each are individual. when memorialized through page, they are more beautiful than the fathomable ideas of our rushed humanity. we will be still.
5. the body who experiences despite consequence, who asks the edge for favors: you are an open window holding a magnifying glass.
6. the poet must know that one cannot have pleasure without an equal or surpassing amount of pain. we must ache.
7. except in struggle, there is no more beauty. a work that’s chest does not heave and strain, that is not bruised and broken, will not delight us with aesthetic epiphanies.
8. why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible? we already live in the absolute, because we have created an eternal, omnipresent dimension of never-ending evolution.
9. we will glorify suffering and hedonism so that those who are adhesive to convention might judge us only after first indulging in our means of attaining beauty.
10. we will know of the individual beginnings and ends of every patch of sky. we will know the personalities, expressions and moods of every strand of our hair, every crease of our skin, every pitch of our voice. we will know every blade of grass. we will carefully choose which flap of the venetian blinds to peek at the morning with. we will watch things as they melt and know the distance of their spread. we will think about someone else’s ears. we will say apple and ask that you tell us the color. we will wallow, oh how we’ll wallow. we will sit in things for too long, thinking. but we will connect and feel and better understand.
