Mary Lou Buschi 
​

Vantablack

More expensive than diamonds or gold.
Hemispherical reflectance below the 1%
visible spectrum. One student asks if it is like
walking into a black hole, that kind of blackness?
How could I answer? Light gets trapped, deflected,
absorbed, and eventually dissipated as heat.
But that’s not the lesson, so we turn back to
transitioning from one state of matter to the next--
What happens? And what really is kinetic energy?
And why do I always pause at sublimation?
A vanishing point. How can I go out from a body
as steam pausing around the bare neck of someone I love
and what really was the right answer when my mother asked,
when you go to the funeral, where do I go? 

Magritte's Eye

On steroids for jaw pain,
              I walk hard through
the leaves still thick
              in July searching for a lake.      
 
No sign, no color marker,
              ​no sound. 
*
When you returned from service
              you called every day.
Hard time
              assimilating. “Mary, what do I do?
 
My phone shaped like an Exersole,
              cradle meeting receiver
in harmony,
              as I paced the length
of my room until pacing felt like floating.
 
*
A black pupil in the lake of an eye.
 
*
Still on the trail, walking on leaf anatomy
              rounded cells, cuticles, veins, epidermis--
I don’t know how else to say it.
 
              You cut your own throat,
 
in your own car,
                                         eclipsing metaphor.
 
*
The sky
              through the Iris of the eye.
 
Obsidian pupil with no convexity.
              Bell ropes passed through the aperture. 




The Imponderable
               After Lyn Hejinian
 
From a bus sign: Body Fluid Clean Up.
Three of the same shoe on the curb.
Scooters like locusts rise from everywhere.
The vanishing of large things, a car, a house, your body.
The Ferris Wheel gleaming like a sharp knife in the mall parking lot.
What was it you couldn’t say after your mind left?
Nerry would like an un-check for each day.
Look at a cabinet long enough it’s a casket.
If I give you 5 shells and you have a bag of shells
how many shells do I have?
What is the depth of infinity if you keep packing
for the same trip after you’ve gone?
Like a map folded one too many times,
your face unrecognizable. 


--
Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) has authored 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024 (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, (2021) was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among others