Marcia Cohee
        Marcia Cohee has been active in the Orange County poetry and LA poetry scenes for many years. She holds an MFA in poetry and her new book, Story, has recently been published by Tebot Bach.
        Marcia Cohee’s poems operate in an ethereal world related to, but removed from, the world of the everyday. The pain of living with illness or loss or being without work is explored, but indirectly and often with humor. Familiar proper names and place-names, more often than not, are put aside in favor of a determined and often intense grappling with essences. Marcia’s poems—always avoiding the trite and the familiar—go off in many different unexpected directions even within a single poem, until we as readers/listeners become aware that we are inhabiting the world of the poet’s psyche more than the recognizable world we’re used to.  It’s often a tough journey, but it’s a journey full of witty and enticing asides. I wonder what it would sound like in French or Spanish or Russian; I suspect this is writing that would/will travel well geographically and in time, since it has broken free from the merely local and topical. But read in English, and by the poet herself, it does open up to the here and now, and becomes intensely palpable.

Begin

Begin like a wingless raven
composing the dark terrain.
Or love
with its narrow margins,
its teeth, trying to fit
the grip of language.

And you never
see it coming, a whisper
of cloud,
combustible as hope.
The sky emptying
its bottle of reasons.

You never see
this love poem
thawing
the cold
universe with its
black wings.

First published in Story, Tebot Bach, 2009

© 2009 Marcia Cohee
Marcia Cohee was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the October 2009 Second Sunday Poetry Series.