POET OF THE DAY: Linda Parsons Marion

Linda Parsons Marion has been a friend for many years, though I see her rarely. Her new book titled BOUND has just been published by Wind Publications, Charlie Hughes's fine press in Kentucky. Linda's poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Cornbread Nation 2, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Potomac Review, CALYX, Helicon Nine, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, among others. Her work was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and she has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards. Essays and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia(University Press of Kentucky, 2003), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia. She lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.

(Cover art by Suzanne Stryk)

Birthmark

High on her luscious thigh, we point
to the map of our corner of the universe.
Faint and violet, a nebula yet unprobed
by the world’s curiosities, we are drawn
to its small burst, star rising in the east.
We’d lasso it to earth if we could, fall
prostrate in awe, shouting glory, revolve
elliptical around the blue-hot core, let brilliance
shoot from our fingertips. Now she crawls
out of reach, xylophone and spinning top
her planets to conquer with flags of grasp
and drool. When her legs lengthen, taper
to womanhood, will this constellation fade,
our worship unmarked, will our wanting hearts
look up and remember this brief heaven?

Sprout

The gardener I never reckoned on, she sows
with the fire of a zealot—rows cowlicked
in garlic, snow peas fence-latticed, mounds
studded gold—my daughter bends to earth’s
pure bidding. She’s living up to her baby name,
called Tater for the sun-brown quickness on nose
and arms. She means to mine these coffers
for yields unborn, sequin the counter with
a gracious plenty. Her reach is the surest we know,
to feed and be sated, even as she nurses
a sprout on her belly’s milk, all of us waiting
for the fruit made flesh, for the muskmelon
to twirl its sweet mouth in pearlized clay
yearning toward first harvest.