2 poems by A. Martine
In Slow Burn Fashion
We had three good months but fires too seldom tended to As the saying goes take to running out It burned your skin and you pretended that it didn’t It burned me too You took it well if not stoically but later it devastated you in waves I pretended not to take at all And it came back with a vengeance At the time you were sober much less gone behind the eyes I picture you fingering a guitar you cannot play Pretending you’re not humoring the joke of alcoholism bubbled budding like water petals on your lips The sugar hazel of your eyes colored by the stain the saddest blue I think by the time I met you I already knew how to do this How to lose a friend and pretend they left you How to lose a person a country a body a life and pretend they left you I took one look and I said I’m gonna lose this man and do it gladly These days the singeing grinding copper fist it digs a cupola in my chest every-time And I think yes yes this is good This is better than the decades-long pretending Because regret it has brought me to my knees Matthew Not the impish kind that made me leave a city for anothernothernothernother The disorienting kind The humbling kind The kind that makes you consider hands going waitaminutewaitaminutenowwaitaminute Just Wait Until you get it really get it But I’ve said this already 1/2 out of love 1/2 just for the heck of it is no way to live a life
Future Self Will Thank You For This
i.
When I was nine I went chasing phosphorescent cowrie shells in the seabed of my aunt’s beach. My cousins’ laughter like cooing seagulls, their waltzing shadows backdropped ways away. I became prescient, I pre-tasted things to come I swam under the West African sun, ablaze, and I was 18 years from now, 27, though I didn’t know it at the time. Remember: I was prescient, contemplating the weight of words, all of the words ever, ones I wrote and ones I felt around for, endless, what a stream. Before I knew it: the playful, scavenging waves mistook me for a spore of seaweed, ladled my little girl body up, around. I pinwheeled, I gyred, I moved back and forward in time, I drank tides,
I thought: something monumental is happening.
I thought: I am drowning.
ii.
I want to talk about the orgasm of death for a jiff a tired diluted analogy but at last years before I would understand what it meant I understood what it meant right before the paroxysm bubbled breath offered like a soggy gift I tasted cherries I climaxed Dutch acts in sea of Dakar a sleep cure for the ages what more fitting than to die where your ancestors lived what more fitting than to drown in the waters from whence you came these things they come in threes this is what I said what I want to say what I heard instead
iii.
Write this down. If you get
out of this, put it into words,
weave those sentences. Later,
when you will have exhausted
the thought of the end, breathed
it, seen it eyes closed,
fantasized all the dancing you’d
do together; later, when you
almost palm one pill too many
or dig that blade a little too
deep, toe the edges of curbs
and hope for winds to do what
your recklessness will not;
when you stop just. short.
enough. it will be good to
remember how it tasted,
how glorious, how freeing,
how promising. You will
remember the cherries, the
pinwheeling weightlessness,
and you will know that coming
home is just a cowrie’s chase
and a playful wave away.
A. Martine is a trilingual writer, musician and artist of color who goes where the waves take her. She might have been a kraken in a past life. She's an Assistant Editor at Reckoning Press and a co-Editor-in-Chief and Producer of The Nasiona. Her collection AT SEA was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize. Some words found or forthcoming in: Berfrois, Déraciné, The Rumpus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Metaphorosis, South Broadway Ghost Society, Gone Lawn, Rogue Agent, Boston Accent Lit, Porridge Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Figure 1, Willawaw, Tenderness Lit. @Maelllstrom/www.amartine.com.