martha clarkson
  • home
  • Read
  • Fiction
  • poetry
  • Blobs
  • camera
  • words
  • design
  • the ages
  • contact & bio
  • folio


​


Distance
 
 
 
Your secrets rest
in the bottom of your mind
deep as pearls
in oysters never opened.
I thought the weight
of my thigh over yours
could keep you like kelp
caught on driftwood
but you move sideways,
a sand crab -
with ocean choices
to ebb
to flow
or have grains of sand
between our skin.



                                                                published Slugfest


Asylum
 
 
 
That afternoon we skipped biology
shed our shyness at the schoolyard fence
laughed swinging toward town
one second of a look at me that said
you are better than any other girl
then showed me the key
to his older friend’s apartment,
a month of drive-ins and cramped cars
building to this vacant dream
we climbed those open metal stairs
I hung onto his back pocket
a butterflied young girl
with rushed blood
listening for the lock turning over.
 
On the shallow hide-a-bed
we undressed each other like movie couples
I thought I’d evaporate,
unbuttoning my shirt
his eyes brimmed in blue desire
without warning completely naked
for the first time
we made shiny, deliberate love
then walked around someone’s
living room, orange kitchen,
showered together and smoked cigarettes
flicked into a beanbag ashtray.
 
We dressed our separate ways
flinched into a spate of sunlight
once again two bashful specimens
parting chastely on a street corner
I could almost hear the clink
of cage door my mother
faltering in her vodka history
teacher’s hand I slapped off my thigh
groceries I sacked hoping to buy
my way out of it all.



                                                              published Amherst Review



Sitting in the Bar Alone on Franklin
 

Was this my father?
Gin and olives
Trying not to come home
 



                                                             published Hole in the Head Review




 
The Pancake Principle           
                                                                                               
in memory of Charles Johnson


$10 a year will get you membership
in The Flat Earth Society
including a map,
like a phonograph album,
and the hundred reasons
why Columbus was right.
Studios in Hollywood
faked the moon landings,
which you admit they did well,
and you spend a horizon of isolation
among tumbleweed and creosote bushes
on the edge of the unwaveringly flat
Mojave Desert where the view
out the trailer window
bolsters your unbendable doctrine.
 
Now you lie horizontal
under a flat granite marker
in a level patch of grass
just the way you like things.
Heaven may be a plank of clouds,
Hell may be the drop-off
at your ice-wall edge.
 
The earth eclipses the moon,
done on a movie set, of course,
continues to turn you slow, so slow.
 
 
 
 
 
Note:  Charles Johnson was the president of The Flat Earth Society.  


                                                                    published Gumball Poetry