Visual Poetry from Rebecca Martin
& a poem from Aïcha Martine Thiam from the archives
This Week
We are thrilled to share 5 visual poems from Rebecca Martin, who offers the following notes on each piece.
"Filmed on Location at Zabriskie Point" utilizes all lines of dialogue (italicized, left-hand column) spoken by actress Joan Marsh in the season one Twilight Zone episode, "The Lonely"(1959).
"Figure 1..." and "Figure 2..." are in direct conversation with Mounawar Abbouchi’s side-by-side translation of Yde and Olive.
"Alter/Altar" is an erasure performed on included primary source excerpts in Jacqueline Murray’s “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages."
"in the archaeological survey..." includes maps from Robert V. Riordan's 1987 archaeological survey of the of portions of the Mound Facility, Montgomery County, Ohio.
Visit our website to view all 5 pieces.
Rebecca Martin (she/her) creates poetry that centers queer womanhood through the personal, familial, and political, simultaneously in conversation with and troubled by the parameters of history and myth. Her work has most recently appeared in print in Oroboro, Birdcoat Quarterly, Everything in Aspic, and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. She is a second-year MFA candidate at Oregon State University, where she is also the poetry editor for literary magazine 45th Parallel.
From the Archives
Kintsugi of Sorts
by A. Martine, whose chapbook AT SEA was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize and is now available from CLASH Books.
When people want to give me things, I say no thanks
I can handle nor the toll, nor the returns
Instead I say here you go, you take this instead
Forever in deficit, but I’ll never be in debt
Little sister hollers in delight when she sees me
My people, they tell me they love me from time to time
Skipped record, I swerve over that sentiment
Why can’t I have that same enthusiasm for people
I have to talk slow, keep those currents pulled inward
Because my voice it always totters toward the end
White-knuckle, flinch/flinch, need it kept at bay
Or else I’ll signal failure like a Doppler effect
Draw nearer and it sounds shriller, distorted
But from afar, my cracks are dusted golden and they gleam
Magazine says they want to publish my words
Fellow artist tells me I am gifted
And I think they must not have any good taste
They must not have heard the waves
I should be a vacuum, charcoal and void-hollow
So that my soul-draining ways be at least justified