this poem appears in

Marcy Rae Henry
| poetry

 

a nice day        a good price
a Sears catalog studied all night
a changing room that makes you want to pee
as if the bar just closed           and you’re walking home
knowing it’s cold    but not feeling what you need to feel
i say : i never understood what a training bra was for
train em for what?
you say :  you say the weirdest shit
at moments like this ++++++and  we walk home like gas
elements               too far apart to find each other
i feel the roots creeping under
the stems transcending
what good does it do to look back
on that time                    when i had never read Lispector
before she had ever eaten lobster
when i tied broken shoelaces together
wrote by a bulb without a shade
walked in the rain   with my blood             all mixed up
where they believed      my grandparents walked
across the border when the truth is
they walked out of fields     finally           overcame
the worst of the sun     pesticides    and everything else
that finally planted them       in the ground
like two native crops
if only  we had more than  1-10
to describe   happiness,    sex,    last night’s  Thai food,
pain,       panic,       teeth grinding         how  badly
you want  to get home and fart or stay home
on Christmas and just order Thai food
a poem is born             in movement             stillness
other people’s shoes             in sickness and in stealth
after all this time       i wonder
how often we appear in each other

Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands and author of We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press), dream life of night owls (Open Country Press), the body is where it all begins (forthcoming from Querencia Press), and red delicious (forthcoming from dancing girl press). She recently won the May Sarton NH Prize for Poetry for death is a mariachi, which will be published in 2025. Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, and first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest. MRae is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts and an associate editor for RHINO.

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