by: J. Marcus Weekley
In J. Marcus Weekley’s two poems, rumination and sudden insight crash into one another as they flare and fade, line by line. These poems offer the fragment as the whole, along with the sly knowledge of how necessary and unsatisfactory that offering ultimately is: “…the mouse wakes in moonlight// It will gnaw you.”
Prose Is A Gnawing Force
after Stevens
Is that what elation is, having everything in your head?
Is it to have, and everything?
Is it nothing to have a mouse or a rat in your chest, to feel it sleeping there?
Tête—wispy cat, old tom, swift-footed feline, he smells shit and spits.
He is like a creature in the skull of every lowly person.
His muscles aren’t the only thing.
But, the mouse wakes in moonlight. Its ears and its whiskers.
It will gnaw you.
Winter
after St. Vincent Millay
To what end, December, do you return this year?
Ugliness is everywhere.
You better shut the fuck up with your shuddering midnight moon and however many souls in the sky.
I forget everything, momentarily.
The breeze burns my eyes as I listen to cardinals bickering.
The sound of leaf-less trees is terrifying.
It isn’t apparent if death is as powerful as love.
What the hell does that mean?
Even above-ground, people’s selves commit to dirt.
Is Life,
alone,
everything: a half-filled can of Chef-Boyardee ravioli, a final ember?
Can it be enough that every fucking year, up in the sky, December silently ignites stars?
J. Marcus Weekley, born in Chattanooga, TN, has lived in seven states, three countries, and many, many imaginary lands, though he currently is in a holding pattern in Mississippi. His writing appears in (most recently) The Curator, Glitterwolf, and Transnational. among others. Marcus has a collection of ekphrastic proems, Singing in the Merman Cemetery, forthcoming in 2018 from CW Books (email him at whynottryitagain@hotmail.com, subject line “Merman,” to preorder a copy). Marcus also paints, photographs, and writes screenplays: www.flickr.com/photos/whynottryitagain2.
