A Poem by Laura Kolbe

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Imagining Marriage: 1

The bellies of right whales, each krill
its jacket of mineral: one meal. The empties
on Tilghman Street: what they will make
in their next heat is maybe a whale’s glass cage,
is maybe the largest bulb in Reno, is certainly
a grey rash of nickels. Hello, goodly transmutation. Hello,
my onus, my many. Two can be many. One can be,
too. At any siren I still hail Mary, the pastor’s way
of saying thywomb like thyroid, fast and ill-accounted,
though now I am praying to the box of noise,
the string of women mimicked in its hosing peal — 
the low one with her black nosegay,
the central matron strong as steel-cut oats,
the soprano, hem on fire, parched red,
smoke-gingered — all these are you
says the ambulance, when not saying
the more important Move. And yet to reduce,

to make a vichyssoise of the large Babylonian heart — 
a feat, and all that ends in –feat. Oh thick roux,
dumb as Napoleon in the goat-hills of his mind
weaving one scratchy blanket for two or three
hundred million backs. We are apart, apart.
Yet how good and still the bed can feel
as you tug at my hair, a thousand brown filaments
a single greased bobbin. How unreal,
to grab so much together. Today in a space movie
a man in orbit tapes long strips of paper
to his airshaft out of dying
to hear the Russian grass. To you
it is all a sick dalliance with ghosts.
Me, I want those streamers, am ready to glue them
all over the house, drowning out even our shared dog,
our real trees, so that always it can be said
our listening is to splits and shards, is in pieces.

Laura Kolbe studies medicine in Virginia. Her poetry, criticism, and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].