D e a d P a p e r

Poems

HEIDI MARSHALL is currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Literature at Florida State University.  She teaches writing and literature at Florida Community College at Jacksonville and has been teaching for almost ten years.  Her poems have been published in The Stolen Island Review, The Maxis Review, and Provincetown Magazine.  Recently becoming a mother for the first time, she looks forward to continued poetic inspiration from her five month old son, Emory.

HEIDI MARSHALL

Nothing Grows Under a Cedar Tree

I imagine you waiting for me
in this flesh cave not too far
from where I write.

We are so close—but I don’t know
if you are there or not
as if you are invisible, but
you are not—I know.

Microscopic at this point.
Circular. Alone. And blind still.

Making you hasn’t been easy,
and we may have failed again.
We will not fail you once you
commence to be—I promise.

Search for your counterpart
swimming toward you.
Float and move and be where
you need to be.

I promise I’ll pick you up
at the bus stop—a crossroads.
A stop sign and a cedar tree.

There’s a child standing on the
shaded would-be vegetation.
It’s you—come into the light.

HEIDI MARSHALL

East Harmony Drive

A chain link fence and a man without an arm
Skin like red bark mulch
Arms dealer
Ex-con with ex-con progeny
Mechanic woman hunter
Mean

The arm was a result of inbreeding your father said with a probably
I rub what part of you I think is closest to the surface
Turn the corner—readjust the automatic leather seats
Continue on unnoticed to the university

The one armed illiterate man lives across the street from my institution
He wears a pink t-shirt
I park in my faculty slot
But caramel can get into cracks and stick to you
Days after that sundae

You and therefore—him—are inside me
A mosquito crept in while I was snoring
laid her eggs in the puddles of my uterus

I will tell you the truth—you’ll never know your great-grandfather
Like my black relatives in Detroit Grandma only let us drive by
A voyeur to his coarse violin voice with Appalachian Br’er Rabbit stories
You may only hear from afar the tales, legends, and unwritten words
He’ll never share with you

HEIDI MARSHALL

On Writing Outside Myself
for William Slaughter

I was everything
I was everyone
my body, my nerves, me

The girl’s hair in front of me
dangled brown on my Physics text
I wiped it away myself
and shifted in my seat
controlled the throbbing heat below
Brown girl turned and glared
her gaze so knowing
so aged
so full of disgust

Fuck her
I didn’t mean that
At lunch her hair passed
It picked up soda or baked chips
I slopped on pizzas or apples

For years, the brown hair tackled me
in the night
I’d wake up in a sweat
and everywhere wet

I never spoke to her

Centuries later maybe
I fell in love in Phnom Penh
stroking Asian grain-like coiffeur
in the night
confessing before we married
of brown hallucinations
and midnight wet dreams

HEIDI MARSHALL

Jamaican Tennis Pro at 88
for Uncle Winston

If I could cut out for you
a piece of Jamaica
a dark flesh chunk of amber earth

You’d swell florescent
like an electric breath
my conjured root mix
sealing your corroded
cancerous bladder

Your hands like crumbled
cardboard boxes

I spread the shea butter
scared that my fingers
will cut your veined flesh

Literary digits are daggers
to aged knuckles

Thick cane accent
thanks me for the cracker
and velvety cheese

mumbles inaudible
something about England’s occupation

Here’s a cube of sugar little boy
dream of your island and
how you miss her

HEIDI MARSHALL

The Pumpkin

I excavate his slimy seeds
sift
............. separate
add salt and bake

Cream sheets on the garage floor
splattered with violated fruit blood
................................................ washed clean
the knife now scrubbed and in the drawer
spoons bent from digging his flesh
................................................ bent back

Innards still under my nails
yet
he rots in the humidity
swollen eyes
..................... droop
on the cement step
His candlelit one-tooth face
has browned at the orifices
like burnt bagel holes

Ants in an assembly line savor his meat
thick row from carcass to variegated Pittosporum
My husband smells the spoil and groans
He sees the guts as gross—
not gorgeous—flesh
as I do

I cannot keep him
He leans back in the barrel
on top of the Hewlett Packard printer box
waits for the truck to crush him
like death
Roaring engine yanks him away

And I think
Why can’t we all
grow fat and swell
in bright flaming color
Then.... Bloom
rot
feed others
disappear in a truck or in the soil
assuage death
like him

Copyright 2008 deadpaper.org, Tim Gilmore

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