Aquamarine
Been a fool too many times:
obsession with a beam of light,
spoken words, something separate
but more than itself,
like aquamarine. Underwater,
how that color wavers
between blue and green
undulates into dream.
I unfold willingly,
a little bit at a time.
I unfold all at once,
a bolt of fabric flung.
Attracted to eyebrows arching
spaces between teeth,
teeth overlapping teeth, the mouth itself.
Flooded with thirst for men I hardly know
and women’s faces. I can’t stop being moved
by words spoken, light seduction.
First right of publication, Torrey House Press. Utah Lake Stories. 2023
Messy Planet
Earth is so precisely blue in those NASA photographs,
so mud-brown close up. Yet, somehow, it is the imperfect world I give heart to with all the sorrow locked in me like a root bound tree. . .
I want to own one jewel, a visible angel breaking the rules.
If there is a gate into that sun, let my grandmother guard it.
Welcome to Maureen Clark's Writing Portfolio
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Paradoxical Lucidity
for my father
in the future we will say that you suffered Alzheimer’s
although suffer is not the right word
you stumbled you stuttered you were submerged
you lost your keys missed the exit forgot how to make change
could not lift your foot over the threshold into the shower
forgot why you held a toothbrush what the soap was for
every morning a new landscape of foreign grasses to navigate
you stood crying at 3 am in the pasture
you sit beneath your oil painting of ducks taking off in the sunset
in that god-awful recliner your brushes barely dry
and know nothing of yourself the artist the jewelry maker
your marksmanship with a gun and ask are you the girl who brings the lunch
and I am a lucid moment in a paradoxical world
Published: Hole in the Head Review v5n1
Thin Hymn
At the year’s end when the dry leaves smell of spent lives This year of small deaths and gone days my mouth full of dead words Can the rain come?
Can it come now in a flood rush?
In the last hour can it come soon in a mud gush? Can the dry leaves of this scorched year make a thin hymn to failed faith Let the hush come