Marie Scarles, Philadelphia, USA
Night Light
Why do we keep shrieking
When we mean soft things?
We should be whispering all the time.
—“100,000 Fireflies” by The Magnetic Fields
It is not enough to be alone each night in the field,
to search for all that flickers, illuminates and glows.
Around me, night air might be sweet, or foul—
honeysuckle or petrochemical. And the field?
It might not be a field at all but instead
a tenement building. People sleeping head to toe
rib to cheek, in Queens. This poem is rhetorical,
not imagistic, excuse me. Images I see in my sleep
in daylight, sold back to me in clips and bites
on a rolling phone screen. On-screen
I see minerals mined by low-wage laborers.
I see poisoning. I see trees snapped like twigs
And children separated from their parents
with signs of PTSD. Scientists say we’ve entered
the age of plastics—headlines keep flickering
between updates on C-list celebrities.
A critic praised a book of poems from the 90s:
there’s no hint in these poems of a social agenda
and still I see fireflies, in the dark, glowing. They hover
over the field, illuminate the transcendent
brilliance by enzyme—by luciferase—derived yes,
from the Latin word “lucifer,” or bringer of light.
My phone brings light and also damages the mind’s eyes,
divides night into shards of ongoing daytime. I raise the phone
at the Bandshell on mid-summer nights and ask myself:
Why do I keep singing when I see hard things?
I should be shrieking all the time.
Bamboo Praxis
Bamboo shoots its way through chainlink
in the backyard, & all summer Max swings at it
with an ax, cracks only stems from deep-rooted
fists that clench below-ground ready to spar
with the leaden dirt & toxic ground. Nothing
we plant lasts long out there: the zucchini plant
flowers, then wilts, the tomatoes stay green
& hard as pebbles, & the garlic scapes curl,
in surrender, to the ground. Despite this,
the bamboo crushes the fence line, upends
the chains that separate me & and my neighbors,
continues to seed and feed the backyard life,
& remakes the scenery: it unearths yards of
English grass, settler lands, French flowers.
Marie Scarles is a writer, editor, and educator based in Philadelphia. She is also an MFA candidate in creative writing and part-time lecturer at Rutgers University–Camden. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and artwork appear in The Rumpus, Believer Magazine, Entropy, Yes Poetry, SIREN Journal, Bomb Cyclone, Tricycle, and elsewhere. Marie writes from a plant-filled office in West Philly.