Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British and was born in Hong Kong. His recent collections are: Gods of a Ransacked Century, Mao’s Mole, Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works, Beautiful Rush, Additional Breathing Exercises and forthcoming from Lavender Ink, This Wasted Land and its Chymical Illuminations. Marc is Executive Editor of MadHat (Mad Hatters’ Review), MadHat Press, and Coeditor-in-Chief of Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics.
.
Weightlessness
100 tornadoes in 24 hours
and you tell me there’s nothing wrong—
I know the sky brushes inside your head
and the Sun has become unbearably hot,
yet you tell me you healed your family
with the cycles of rising of stars—
as if stars had anything to do with OCD,
and your daughter’s truck driver friends
knew anything about Sartre.
It is only in our decisions
that we are important.
It’s not always about the matriarch, you’d said,
more often it’s about that habitable zone and what you make of it,
how primitive life forms
react to sunlight,
how dinosaurs eventually arise
from of single cells,
how creatures like us
learn to take
wind, water, fire and earth
shake and stir, and recreate life in test tubes.
.
Pheromones
Night dreams of day
and day of that tremulous moment
when red-gold washes
over hills, and trees
whisper pheromones,
coax birds to sing lovesongs
before the rising
are dedicating letters
to distances measured,
traversing mountains chains,
seas crossed, forests conquered,
numbered things—
an unlikely grouping
of similar or related artifacts
like collectable porcelain angels
in all manner of speculative poses—
to look upon in glass cases
when they have immeasurable time,
when they have grown
terribly old.
.
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