Marsha de la O’s first book of poetry, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and a Small Press Editor’s Choice Award. She is the winner of the dA Poetry Award and the Ventura Poetry Festival Contest. She has published in journals such as Barrow Street, Passages North, Solo, and Third Coast. She was raised in the Los Angeles area and now lives in Ventura, California where she is co-editor for the literary journal, Askew. She is currently working on a novel.
This
Is My Chance
To untangle the riddle—and he is a bramble, an enigma, a dew-eyed ramble, mouth full of quips, both the bird and the bush, a brother and a briar, a metabolic frolic. An off-kilter wallop. Able to pound out, scratch out, peck out—he’s no tabula rasa, he’s written up, written off into thousands of sunsets, black and white and red all over. He’s the noisiest quiet you’ll ever want to know, my big yes, my full court press, chary, a skinflint with lexicon but rash on syntax; no warrior, yet nature built him compact—the better to swing a battle-axe—he told me that on our second date, a stray molecule yearning to burn in the bond of forever, he’s my snake-bit baby, my history of the blues, my personal fuse-box, a witness, a litmus test, a stroll in a dog-park, no saint, but, oh, that man is something fresh about a bird…
To untangle the riddle—and he is a bramble, an enigma, a dew-eyed ramble, mouth full of quips, both the bird and the bush, a brother and a briar, a metabolic frolic. An off-kilter wallop. Able to pound out, scratch out, peck out—he’s no tabula rasa, he’s written up, written off into thousands of sunsets, black and white and red all over. He’s the noisiest quiet you’ll ever want to know, my big yes, my full court press, chary, a skinflint with lexicon but rash on syntax; no warrior, yet nature built him compact—the better to swing a battle-axe—he told me that on our second date, a stray molecule yearning to burn in the bond of forever, he’s my snake-bit baby, my history of the blues, my personal fuse-box, a witness, a litmus test, a stroll in a dog-park, no saint, but, oh, that man is something fresh about a bird…
© 2013
Marsha de la O
Marsha de la O was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the March 2013 Second Sunday Poetry Series
Marsha de la O was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the March 2013 Second Sunday Poetry Series