Two Poems by Mark Fleury

The Sea’s Eye

Blending bones and sand grains, the inside
Of its lid, twilit just before sleep, catches

The moonlight’s spin
On past lives, brain-shadowed tide;

And dripping drying seeds
And receding feelings from its shore door,

I stood on the table at the writers’ workshop,
Shaking

Shadows of infinitely echoed

Suburban Anne Sexton suicides and
“Glads you didn’t do it” from my hair

Like crackling flame-skinned

Apples.



Throated Black and White Content

The black and white shared body
Had both colors: a skeleton-skinned and spaced,
Petaled, candle-singed bouquet

To welcome me back, and a checkered floor.
I’d lived in the past’s dark sea so many lifetimes,
Why was I scared of its door? And its

Wheels’ hubs changing from moon
To sea to earth, now flowering, opening.

But the fall dusk window wasn’t shut

And the floor shore was cold. Nervously shadow-
Talking from this throat room since time
Changed from cyclical to linear, hearing

The taste of harmonica-toned,
Past lives bones lapping at my door to place’s form
Made it new. Unlived in. Wind and rain
Shivered the green writing chair, near

The tide. Outer journeys offered their fame flashes
As if verse is added to vision, like drawing oneself
On a postcard’s photograph.

Once in, blinded by not beginning,
The flash, paned, mistook for the window’s
Opening, devolved endless me, devoured by the sun.

Gravel roads walked down and cigarettes my time.
Audiences of eggs for miles, hatching childhoods.

Or of rocks, gifts to be opened in pink-walled rooms.
That branch’s family tree house has an end placed

On the ground I start from. Saved,
The taste of creative Light, the jewels

That are windowed Pyramid guts, is earned.

____________________________

Mark Fleury lives in Saint Paul, MN. He has had poems published in Counter-Example Poetics, Of / With: a Journal of Immanent Renditions, Altpoetics, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Altered Scale, Vext Magazine and many others. Mark's fifth book of poetry, The Eight Wheeled Doorway of Serpent's Head, was just published by Scars Publications in March of 2017.