A POEM BY MARCI NELLIGAN


          Missives


          Dear B,
          I have captured all my fear in plastic cups,
          frantically deoxygenated insects. It’s just in case
          the phrenomenologists, massaging the future into
          palpable dismay, forget some things.
          Have you thought about the
          noise the body makes, its rhapsodic, muted jazz?


          Forget clarity, it’s long long teeth—you can’t mean it when
          you say “blood is evidence of
          our liquidity.” We both know it congeals in the veins
          and clogs the heart. Each body is a
          microorganizational miracle, an agreement of the
          terrible made whole. Life gets you in the knees, exudes
          enough salt to kill every kidney. Still we relish it, each lip that forms
          another word, these transparent cells formed entirely of
          water.
          -M.


          Dear B,
          Now everything is curtains. The forms filled
          themselves in with gin and pencil marks. Down to the
          last nickel and the temperature falls, anvil-like,
          cartoony. The bar is full of dime beer and melody box,
          people who live in subdivisions of their own luminous
          skin. You said “I think not luminous,”† but if none of us
          are shiny we stand to lose our benefits. “ Art” and “artery”
          are part of the same organ system, the biophrastic heart .
          -M.



          Dear B,
          California made me feel more everything than anything, especially
          alone. It isn’t just the obvious ocean that caught
          bits of us alive, its all the cliff line and slip, the
          ruined first century bathhouses, the everlasting
          trees. West is a forest of the possible, washed by
          light more salient than disease. Houses of mud, angels
          of asphalt, that holy wreckage of might have been.
          -M.

          Dear B.,
          Kids are always looking out for coins, not enough
          cents to put it together, a plan for sweet junk and a
          little game in the sun. The grass is prickly in the
          parks because they sharpen it.
          Love,
          M.

          Dear B.,
          Don’t get the impression I’m always talking to you
          because a device impedes the present alphabet. I need
          you like a wall or the surface of still water, and you
          are always imaginary inside the ram or rom, like an
          old Israeli king.
          -M.


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Marci Nelligan's poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Moria, Dusie, eratio, Word For/Word, Verse, The Tiny, H-ngm-n, Chain, syllogism, Outside Voices’ Anthology of Younger Poets, and other journals.


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