A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Two Poems by Marie Scarles

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.

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