Perfection is Defined by Expectation
BY JenMarie MacdonalD
It’s not Day of the Dead
yet but close enough
to abandon a private altar
of reflective precision
in favor of frivolity.
A darkened room,
in which I see the radio
happen. Psychedelic
honky tonk cloaked in marigold
in sky
blue earth tones.
So fast, time
pitched through my bones,
turning to make a single
reminiscence. Last year
I centered my hands
within a holy growth spurt.
My God
is 40 million light years
out. I turn up for mass
with my new apparatus
but the stars don’t
do their part.
My divine carriage
Pegasus is stabled
behind a tinny band
of exhaust.
The Little Sombrero
a spot on its saddle. Its body
the ghost of deity
I cover in tidy chiffon
and chrysanthemums.
Drape ornaments beneath
my outlook.
Open the stars
to swallow the jaw.
We Woke Here Digital Natives in a Brand New Time
and threw the patterned wrap
off morning. In the darkness
the narratives
could be loosely interpreted
from scant language we half knew.
Astrobrallos can’t scale
images and leave our devices
with the space between
swift-moving dashes.
We are apart
much farther than we look.
Easy and binocular.
Our clusters age.
Our bodies
are similar sisters
from the same
northern constellation
forming fields.
JenMarie Macdonald is half of Fact-Simile Editions and builds books and poems from recycled and reclaimed material. She is the author of Sometime Soon Ago (Shadow Mountain, 2009) and co-author with Travis Macdonald of Graceries (Horseless Press 2013) and forthcoming Bigger on the Inside (ixnay press).