2 Poems by Marsha de la O

Invisibility Cloak


I’ve been trying to plumb the deep.

I’ve been trying to disappear. Call me

purple.  Call desire a tangled skein.

Say it lives in every tentacle. Do you care

much for the lonely, alone in the sea?

Glass squid dive a thousand meters, light

down on the edge of light.  The idea is

simple: attention must be paid to chasm-

dwellers, we all need chaos or a fellow

shade the same nebulous shape. Which

is to say, I’d like to slide under your cape.

You, with your leaky fiber optics, you

with your smidge of sun, I want to be

the violet that melds into your night



The afterlife of flames


After fire blackens the earth,

after a scarf of smoke presses

against the wound, the embryo

inside its sack, ripe and resting

in a chemical sleep, there’s

no need to abide any longer,

no need for the abode, the

hut, the hull, the home, only

translation is required to un-

coil a long-limbed seed, a pip

braiding itself into a child

the color of sunset, four petals,

naked stem, one bloom arching

her narrow body over harm.


Bionote

Marsha de la O's new book, Every Ravening Thing, came out in Spring 2019 from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Antidote for Night won the Isabella Gardner Award and was published in 2015 by BOA Editions.  Her first book, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Prize and was published by New Issues Press.