Poetry – Issue 14 | February 2012
Other Than
by Dana Guthrie Martin
I had my life once, where the branches of an oak
met in the shape of a divergent letter L.
I had it up there, playing sentinel above the ugly
ground, neither of us apologetic for what we were,
and were not. A candy cigarette hung from my mouth
the way I’d seen real ones caught in my mother’s tight
lips, their shafts smeared with adobe-colored L’Oreal,
the kind that shimmers like fish scales.The design
of cigarettes moved me to dissection. White paper
thin as onion skin holding at bay soil-rich tobacco.
The thick, fibrous material of each filter, dark with tar
after use. Years later, I would learn we all grow dark
filtering out what the world is in favor of what it is not.
A dry creek bed becomes something other than a gash
that will never heal. A dead tree other than lightening, upside
down, reaching toward, rather than falling from, the sky.
About the author
Dana Guthrie Martin was born and raised in Oklahoma and now finds herself living in rural eastern Washington after stints in Kansas City, Missouri, and Seattle, Washington. Her chapbooks include The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2011) and In the Space Where I Was (Slack Buddha Press, forthcoming).
Read our current issue, Issue 14 | February 2012:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
