2 poems
by Mary DiPrete
Mary DiPrete is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry with roots in the deep woods of Oregon, the islands of the Puget Sound, and the prairies of Western Illinois. She has recently worked as a farmhand, an elementary school arts teacher, a lead pipe surveyor, and at Portland’s smallest distillery. Her work has appeared in Catch, is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, and is mostly about gas stations and bat embryos.
Gas Station at the Edge of the World
We drove all night
to the place where everyone
shuts up. The road is road then,
un-roaded. The moon is always burning
itself out. We pass a field
of radio masts blinking as a body.
The rain moves light
across your jaw, phosphorescent.
In the ditches
the lilies are breathing in waves.
This sky will
leave you too. 1/1000
of unrehearsed nowhere. Come
back the same.
Left Hook
Listen:
you can unhinge
your jaw to seduce
the hayfields.
Say
orbital pull, faith,
deck yourself, or a light
I want—
being its job to lie
and all.
Scratch that.
I’m scraping
the day off
the asphalt,
swallowing the hayfields,
sitting alone
against the wall
at the dance,
swallowing the light.
Yes, like that.