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Marlin M. Jenkins
The deep rainbow of oil slicked
in the supermarket parking lot
calls to me with its dark beauty
to step in and paint dirty
my already worn-white shoes.
At camp the bonfire's reaching
tongues ascended to try to lick
the tree. I would throw whatever
trash I had in to see what
colors the garbage would burn:
turn from waste to green or
purple glow. Fall: the horse
pulled a hayride and I traced
the patterned indentations
the straw left on my thighs.
I can no longer see oil
and not think of the ocean
bloated with it, a duck or otter
mucked with viscous liquid
now just black and not glinting.
I can't see a horse without
thinking of the bloodied day
when the marchers were met
on the bridge and trampled, baton
and hoof making fragile work
of brown-encased bone.
How's that for nonviolence?
Even the ocean catches fire
with enough oil or gas. Even a gas
can eat through an atmosphere
or a lung. I can't stop clearing
my dry throat and my groans
sync into metronome, turn music
to pain and itch. Nathanael West,
a lesser-known modernist, writes:
"The physical world has a tropism
for disorder, entropy." I can't stop
building monuments to the chaos.
I can't stop adoring the blood's
cool crimson, how it insists
on spilling out sometimes even
from a small nick. I tell
my psychiatrist I have gotten
very good at finding the beauty
in this awful and awe-filled world,
but it gets hard to feel it. The head
can hold knowledge the body
rejects. Nathanael again: "All order
is doomed, yet the battle
is worthwhile." I'm still reaching
like that polluted fire. I'm hoping
if I reach the branch I use it not
to burn down but climb up.
from the journal MIZNA
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This poem was quilt-like in process: many of the images—oil in a parking lot, campfires, 1965's Bloody Sunday—were ones I'd tried to write about before but they never found their way. Once I started with one image, I let association drive me into the others. I wanted to conclude not with carrying on the poem's obsession with destruction, but with a reach toward hope.

Marlin M. Jenkins on "Glint"
Color cover image of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's book, Negative Money
"Ten Questions for Lillian-Yvonne Bertram"

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram talks with Poets & Writers about their new book, Negative Money. "Once I had the poems it was challenging to think about what kind of story they could tell, what was missing, what needed to be added or amended. Things I wrote in the past I wouldn’t write today, but I also wouldn’t necessarily change them. Reconciling the different types of writer I have been proved to be more challenging than I expected."

via POETS & WRITERS
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Cover of the translation of Rene Char's The Brittle Age and Returning Upland
What Sparks Poetry:
Jody Gladding on René Char's The Brittle Age and Returning Upland 

"There are other more comprehensive volumes of Char’s work in translation....But this one offers a wonderful bookness. There’s an integrity to the object, the physical form with the page as its basic unit, the short poems set in that space, nothing to distract me as I turn the page, or don’t. It fits in the hand, rests on a shelf, travels in a pack."
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