Half-flavour, half-fever.
A shading object,
shiny still.
An ally in the depths of the sparkle,
hungers I cannot even grade?
Exploding again,
stretched into fresh galaxies,
craving sniff,
right there and off,
a constellation?
Stiff mid-air
laughing at my shudder
whether or not he would ramble and tear.
I get balance
even from the shake of missing
and carve your name
into the tabby-skinned night.
I was supposed
to pretend I was contagiously ill,
or call it ketchup week,
red tide, a visit from Aunt Flo,
surfing the red wave,
closed for maintenance,
Ruby Tuesday, Red Hand Gang,
Curse of the Red Baron,
communists in the lust house.
A thing of no account,
an untouchable myth.
I felt like shouting: I only shed what I don’t need.
I kept fidgeting: WHAT IF I GET A STAIN?
I had to hide my pads,
wrap them in a cheeseburger bag, a panty rag,
layer on layer, as if an offering to a clumsy god;
bury them next to my fluffy Mikey,
hurriedly and safe, the way murderers get rid of the proof.
Azaleas are acid-loving plants – for lush compost,
they blew on the grave.
Once he started leaking.
We employed a nurse, full time,
bought a roomful of bandages.
He was on the Blood Show,
tattered and determined,
LOOK, I CAN MENSTRUATE!
The One who gives for our sins,
The One who braces himself;
he’ll get enough back in the battlefield.
3. Voilance
My muse Equus,
tract me and distract
me,
tell me the trance
from balance.
Wrap yourself in the
wind,
save mysteries and
shiver.
Sail in the teeth of
time.
In-between universe,
choice morsel
Survoland,
unbrowsable
legends.
Inside caress,
outside hiss.
Over but not yet
past.
Clandestine of
routines.
About Agnes Marton
Agnes Marton is a Hungarian-born poet, writer, librettist, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK), art curator at One Hand Clapping Magazine and reviews editor at The Ofi Press. Recent publications include her collection Captain Fly’s Bucket List and four chapbooks with Moria Books (USA). She won the National Poetry Day Competition (UK), and an anthology she edited received the Saboteur Award. Her work is widely anthologized; some examples include Alice: Ekphrasis at the British Library and Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen. Her fiction was called “exceptional” at the prestigious Disquiet Literary Contest (USA). In the award-winning poetry exhibition project Guardian of the Edge, thirty-three accomplished visual artists responded to her poetry. She has been a resident poet at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, on a research boat in the Arctic Circle, and also in Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Serbia, Portugal, Chile, Canada and the United States. She is based in Luxembourg.