Cate Marvin

Issue 13 • April 2014

Some nights when the dusk is done hurting 
the glass-shards shaken out onto the street,

has finished stirring the empties’ smashed
embers up with late light into fits of glint, I try 

a little harder to remember. In the same
manner smoke alarms alert us to their

weariness by emitting a meagering succession 
of beeps, you’ll try my memory while I sit 

back on my couch with a drink; feel for me what 
it was to drop my eyes out a plane’s porthole 

into the maw I saw below: an ice-island lying flat 
beneath, clouds layered between it and me, 

an elderly lady in the seat beside me snoring 
in Chinese, our craft short-cutting its way to 

Hong Kong over the Arctic Circle. Understand,
I never expected my eyes to land on that land 

on which your eyes flew from out your skull. 
And that fortune teller I dismissed, who said she

could hear two boys knocking on our cloud
door, anxiously waiting to be born unto us. 

Weeping into the cup of myself on the subway:
the kindest look handed down by a stranger!

A portrait in a porthole closes with one eye.
Remembering your hand suspending a jewel 

of cheap wine shining garnet in a jelly glass.