close as Venice

and if shores wash orange with sea change
and flamingos wade a pink foamed beach
and meridians slip north and south…where
ice islands…harmless…circle earth cool clear
cubes of iridescence

and people sing to each other close like Venice
and hand-write words to paper…slips pinned
to color coded windows…walls and doors shaded
for degrees of dark despair…and lightened for
the bloom of promises…and hope

we shall become a silent movie stuff of need
to tell and touch with bonds direct..profound and
strange as emerald studded starfish on the sands
and oysters hatching diamonds in our hands

 

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Kolmon Moser
Draft for a Metal Relief, 1904

dreaming flamingos

I’m New England woman in my mind,
a transcendental eyeball on a hill…
I’m hiking boots pacer in gray wool
sweater under layered against itch

I’m gazer at dewed spider webs,
I’m sheltered…early in a box house
of sunsilvered windblown pine

and…I dream about flamingos
pin Geographic glossies inside
my kitchen cupboard door…where
I store white cups and plates and bowls

and… I think about the hearing of
their raucous squawking in flame pink
beauty pools…and I smile to think
they synchronize direction in a gawky
urgent mating dance…there in Africa,
Peru…Belize…Galapagos…and…and
the Caribbean…in narrow arrow flight,
flower washed rose carnation amaranth

now…I gaze at tropic embers in my hearth
glimmering…resin sputters in gray ash
and I boil live lobsters in a cooking pot
and listen for their tiny scream

 

Bonnie Marshall

Art by John Audubon
“Flamingo and Roseate Spoonbill”

Money Mecca in the Desert

Money mecca first is glow behind dark hills
then flames to razzle-dazzle boulevards of sidewalked
believers seeing visions…offering flashing idols
metal paper plastic…handing chips and cards to proxies
in temples where prayers of the faithful…please god please
rise to heaven through tobacco incense haze toward
all seeing watchers over them.

Where devotion…caffeine stoked…blurs lines
of day and night as acolytes peak intensity
with alcohol and speed, and where testosterone
sifts in city air to blend with auto fumes.
Where dulled disciples receive comfort
at the altars of buffet, and toss trample
paper icons of nude gods and goddesses
offered from street stationed church of
Eros zealots.

Where each Monday, delegated deacons
follow morning rites, bag chips left in
collection plates at Sunday’s mecca churches,
appear at the temples’ gates for a ritual
of redemption.

Bonnie Marshall

 

Artwork by Leroy Neiman

I Know Him Like He Knows His Name

When I hear e nerve its sting in needle
the power of my thinking in the margin
makes skin prick on my scalp
there just behind my ears…
and I feel the tiniest annoyance
in my brain corners as I read of births
where mere Roman numerals confer lineage
prestige and preferment nearly royal
to a new born son…and I sense resentment dash
my female mind, for it is rarely daughter true.

There’s mystic power in a name…
shades of understanding that a Debbie
is not Deborah, and a Jimmie is not James.
And, when I asked Sam if he liked his name
or would ever change it…he looked away,
eyes hooded like a lizard in the sun,
and took long slow breaths and smiled.

“I’m glad they named me Sam…ever since
some green egg story Mother read me
when I learned that Sams know how
to question and to listen…take notice
how people change their mind and it’s
no matter…not like a Theophilus…although
a Theo might stay to hear you for a while.”

Then I remember…thinking just behind my ears
and in nether margins of my brain how amply
absolutely fits his name no sham am is Sam.

Bonnie Marshall

Artwork by Anastasia Tversky

 

my star is in Electra

 

 

my star is in Electra…
my place in the Pleiades…in Taurus
where I’m B6174556 etcetera because
he gifted it to me…gilt framed registered
on parchment one year for my birthday

gave me a cosmos print complete
with triangulated lines centered to my
spark so I shall know where I always am
and where I’ve always been and always…
where I’ll be nailed to a hallway wall with
a painted still life and family photographs

no matter…I’m no believer…I shall cast within
the cosmos of my mind…watch dry crystal hurricanes,
hear clang of three tone chimes brake scrape like trains,
breathe deep rum raspberry gunpowder charred steak
and welding fumes in that so iced and flamed a world

 

Bonnie Marshall

Artwork by Kenneth Brauchler