READ A POEM
by Sarah Marcus
We Visit the Grizzlies
At the zoo, we’re against the glass.
Together, a twisted mirror of becoming
more ourselves and less the animals
inside us—
we hero our way through the pine.
If I could zipper your fur into my skin—
all the human, the smell, rubbed off
in the moment before the moment
when the pasture bursts with silvery lupine—
the rain or your knotted hair
violent in a mean mountain wind.
One day, when I can believe
the things you tell me,
when you no longer feel obligated,
when we are permanent as rock,
we will be blood,
and we, we won’t
even have to cut our hands open;
press them together—
you growling, tighter,
I’ll always want you tighter.
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“We Visit the Grizzlies” by Sarah Marcus, from
Every Bird, To You. CC Press. 2013. Used by permission of the author.
ABOUT TODAY’S POET
Sarah Marcus is the author of
They Were Bears (Sundress Publications, 2017),
Nothing Good Ever Happens After Midnight (GTK Press, 2016) and the chapbooks
BACKCOUNTRY (2013) and
Every Bird, To You (2013). Her other work can be found at NPR’s
Prosody,
The Huffington Post,
McSweeney’s,
Cimarron Review, and
cosmopolitan.com, among others. She is also an editor at Gazing Grain Press, a spirited volunteer at
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the series editor for As It Ought to Be’s High School Poetry Series: Gender, Identity, & Race. Marcus holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and teaches and writes in Cleveland.
WRITE A POEM
Ask another poet to give you one line from an unfinished poem of theirs while you give the poet one of yours.
Both of you write a poem and compare them when you are finished (or post a line in the comments section below, and look for a posted line in return).