TRANSPLANT OF MARROW
Your cruel April begins in the dark where
there is still dark to these ends
of days. Still a blue evening, somewhere lilacs
still roosting with creatures nesting and
dishes resting in racks to dry.
Your dead-to-life April will last for the duration
of spring burgeoning. Am I up
to this task? Can there be sufficient
pauses
between synaptic links, torpedoes over the corpus
callosum, sufficient space
between there and beyond
to hold up my half. Let the month, the open mouth
do its work—your lips grim—
and I, I
I
will
do
mine.
Of course, she left
no carbon footprint. Her feet
were made of lead.
The lead barricades shielding
her chest from dental x-rays caught
decay in rear molars, suspicion
of further erosion of gum and
the last teeth to cut, but
shields can only shield
so much. Her heart beneath
her chest knew the lead from early
on. Knew where it originated
where the dumb barrier discovered
its ground.
The gamma pulses pierced
anyway. She stored the messages
as data. To see her
as a pioneer of ecological promise
was a system error. Carbon no longer, now
she feasts with the silicone gossips
that surround her encampment.
Circling the wagons, so to
speak.
Author’s Bio
With work appearing throughout the US and Canada, C.M. Clark’s publication credits include Painted Bride Quarterly, Prime Number Magazine, The Paddock Review, Ovenbird, South Florida Poetry Journal, After Happy Hour Review (forthcoming), Gulf Stream Magazine, as well as the anthologies Travellin’ Mama (Demeter Press) and Chasing Light (Yellow Jacket Press). She also served as inaugural Poet in Residence at the Deering Estate Artists Village in Miami. Full-length works include Charles Deering Forecasts the Weather & Other Poems and Dragonfly, as well as the chapbook, The Five Snouts (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her most recent collection, Exoskeletal, was released in May 2019.
