Mary Szybist was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in 1970.  She earned degrees from University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her first collection of poems, Granted, published in 2003 by Alice James Books, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a 2009 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress.  Her poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and other journals.  She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

 

Purchase her books here. And read more of her work here, here and also here.

 

 

 

The Lushness of It

It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you
with each of its tapering arms:

you’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus.  But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think

about themselves, or you.  Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn.  Abandon
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon

your heavy legs to the floating meadows
            of seaweed and feel
                        the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea-
spray, barnacles.  In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over
the abyssal plains and as you float you can feel
                                    that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
                          your spine.  You can feel
fished for and slapped.  No, it’s not that the octopus
wouldn’t love you.  If it touched,

if it tasted you, each of its three
hearts would turn red.

Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon.  Not its dotted head.

 

Knocking or Nothing

Knock me or nothing, the things of this world
ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish

clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts.
Let them.  Let the fans whirr.

All the similar virgins must have emptied
their flimsy pockets, and I

was empty enough,
sugared and stretched and dazed on the un-mown lawn,

dumb as the frost-pink tongues
of the un-pruned roses. 

When you put your arms around me in that moment,
when you pulled me to you and leaned

back, when you lifted me
just a few inches, when you shook me

hard then, had you ever heard
such emptiness? 

I had room for every girl’s locket,
every last dime and pocketknife.

Oh my out-sung, fierce, unthinkable—
why rattle only the world

you placed in me?  Won’t you clutter the unkissed,
idiot stars?  They blink and blink

like quiet shepherds,
like brides-about-your-neck.

Call them out of that quietness. 
Knock them in their nothing, against their empty enamel,

against the dark that has no thing to hold them
and no appetite.

Call in the dead to touch them. 
Let them slip on their own chinks of light.