Marina Hope Wilson
​

Narrative

​A story best left untold involves an old barn,
the concrete floor. Add swallows, their fleeting darkness.

Hold it together like a mud nest packed with tiny bones.
Place a wooden ladder at its center.

Three small girls stand below, chins tilted up.
One of them refuses shoes—she’s the climber.

The new birds have enormous gray heads and odd yellow beaks.
They are sleeping, but the girls want to see them awake.

What occurs after the wanting can’t be undone—her slim
arm’s reach, the raw expanse, the broken birds, their open throats.

I prefer not to say so, not to tell it at all.
I prefer the absence of verbs, but I don’t have a choice.
​
Shame is stubborn. It has a way of sticking--
that is, if you feel it at all.

---

Just Because it’s Electric Doesn’t Mean it Has Currency

They count their rings like trees.
Recall the awkward scramble into
his blue 4x4, music with the windows down,
blond hair opening into sunlight
like dandelion seeds.

Daily calls to the house,
picking her up on the front porch,
a host family in a host town.
A departure.

They suffered
a stupid kind of beauty--
youth filled.

Now he doesn’t remember
their first conversation,
her last name--
​
a note passed lightly
from one hand to another.
That green, green grass.

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Marina Hope Wilson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Massachusetts Review,  Horse Less Review,  Mulberry Literary,  Kissing Dynamite, The Racket, and $. Her chapbook, Nighttime, was a finalist in the Black Lawrence Press Spring 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition. Marina lives in San Francisco with her husband, stepdaughter, and two cats, and makes her living as a speech-language therapist.