Amy Marques
Chorus Line of Silent Protests
You couldn’t argue with Alex’s brother Sean because he won any argument, not because he actually knew what he was talking about, but because he kept repeating himself louder and louder and was the kind of stubborn that thought if you just heard and understood what he was saying you’d obviously agree with him because there’s only one way of thinking of things and that was however Sean believed things should be, so Alex had learned to retreat into stillness and order his thoughts like a chorus line of silent protests while Sean went on and on about how people these days had no work ethic, not like when he’d been a postman in the 50s and never complained about what was mailed because that was before people started making up words for everything and giving you all these forms with tiny letters you couldn’t even read with magnifying lenses, besides it couldn’t be illegal to mail their mother’s remains to their sister in the East Coast because it would be, after all, fitting since, as an infant, she’d been mailed—sealed and stamped and all legal and everything—and carried by the postman from her parent’s house to live with her grandmother a dozen miles away and it was obviously much harder to carry an actual live infant than it was to carry a box of dust and you should, of course, agree.
The Sea is Kindest to Poets
~ after Neruda’s The Sea & also after the legend of Labismena
Year after year, ferryboats deliver them to Mena’s shores: wild-haired intellectuals with a penchant for stroking island cats, baby poets who walk the beaches, notebooks in hand, seeking lessons in the crunching shells and ceaseless waves, wanting to harvest the grace of the wind and the rhythms of the tides.
Year after year, they gather at Mena’s table. The guests digest ideas with fervor as she refills their cups. She wonders if they know she’s been hearing much of the same for decades, that her sea has lulled others who’d spoken similar thoughts, who have themselves to have achieved unprecedented vastness on these shores.
Year after year, sabbaticals done, they leave. The kindest among them have learned her name and promise to send word, to send books, to send invitations to fulfill her dream of knowing what lies beyond her shores.
Once, she believed them. But after years and years, Mena is no longer susceptible to words spoken under the spell of the sea. She knows that when the guests are gone, their promises disappear like the sun when it sets a torch to the horizon; the water reflects its flames for a moment, before pulling them into the deep. Her sea endlessly crashes against the shore, against the shattered shells, the grains of sand, once whole mountains, which now wash out beneath her sinking feet.
Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She’s been nominated for multiple awards, longlisted twice in Wigleaf 50, and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Raw Lit, Ghost Parachute, BOOTH, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is the editor and visual artist for the Duets anthologies and author and artist of the chapbook Are You Willing? and the found poetry book PARTS. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
Check out Amy’s featured gallery in DIHP’s November 2024 Art & Hybrids section.
