Betsy Mars - Providence

Betsy Mars is a poet, photographer, and occasional publisher. She founded Kingly Street Press and released her first anthology, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife, in October 2019. Her work has recently appeared in Verse Virtual, San Pedro River Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Better Than Starbucks. Her chapbook, Alinea, was published in January 2019. In the Muddle of the Night, with Alan Walowitz, is coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press. Her poem, Pyriscence, won one of the Alexandria Quarterly First Line Poetry Contest Series awards in 2020. She is grateful for having had the experience of living in Brazil as a child which exposed her to another culture and language at an early age. She is an avid traveler (when possible), language learner, logophile, and animal enthusiast.

Providence

I want to live where it’s possible to have a doe lay down her fawn in a pile of violets and cedar upon my lawn, with bird song to lull since I can’t sing - to be the bird (or even the fawn), the doe out searching when milk is scant, the rabbits tumbling in the field, the woman who mows and walks the labyrinth - or even the labyrinth itself, pilgrims mumbling, quiet path of meditation laid out for work, a different kind of use than this daily wearing, feeling tread upon, a kind of searing self-abuse. I want to live in fields of violet, lie down in the temple of the twilight.

From a Dream of Drowning Children

Everywhere the I submerged there were two of them a boy and girl, eyes pleading reflected in spoons or the surface of lagoons the wait, for me, endless their lashes wet so long and bright.

Red Flag Winds

For CK

Charles returns on a gust through an open window. In my room curtains billow, blinds lift, paintings hung on nails shift as air comes in. In the night, the house shakes with what could be a foreshock. A door slams as the house seeks equilibrium. As I settle back into sleep, he laughs, his mouth full of air again. We find each other in the hall. There is no aftershock as we grapple with our luck, the wild joy of it all.