SARA RENEE MARSHALL

from CORRESPONDENT

HERRING

There is the pale flesh of a pluot and the magenta of its skin seeping in. And here comes a flood of available analogies to the end of purity, or the obvious girl in her obvious pale dress, or the luscious guilt of getting fucked.

My mind hangs just to the side of my shoulder, and this is how I watch what I want: less speech, the sudden heat of you who’ve been remembered hiding down a hallway since our last meal. Or meal is a red herring for recency, and heat is a memory—the sky delimited to a white diamond out the window. 

MULTIPLICITY

Deleuze coined anti-arborescence knowing the thickest branch always postures for lead growth. This arrests priority, makes room for the or—fused or simultaneous. The twin or the twins braided together in blood, fond of different colors.

Or the many ways to find you in this field of wheat: tunneling through mud, unraveled from the sky, or letting our voices collide when the dream reduces to its sounds. I am here. I am in a warm fog chained together by love’s murmurs. I am captive in a photograph next to a distant lake. You are seer to this story or the muscle in my throat.

VISIBILITY

There are hundreds of ways to stir contour. In this chromatic trick, a lit face and dark feet lure you into my levitation. That is to say, I’m not known from an armchair, and ankles are figments in a narrative of continuance. Some places we abandon in tapering fissures—water hoaxes the lens can’t detect. Blue cooked into glass, a gasp snuffed in sheets, a burn called forward from your lips lost in the dark, if you say so.

Mirrors listen to light's unholy script. How do I come into my own company—an ablution of the night's stock film. The wall is a neutral board to echo off or to limit my veins and learn their urgency. I am seen when lost, void of language. When a formless whisper overtakes the airwaves. I am seen most exactly with open palms.

Sara Renee Marshall hails from Colorado. She is the author of a chapbook, Affectionately We Call This The House (Brave Men Press). Her poems can be found places like Interrupture, Everyday Genius, Colorado Review, Omniverse, and elsewhere. She holds degrees in Political Science, History, and an MFA from University of Colorado. Sara is headed to University of Georgia to pursue a PhD.