Severance of a Falling Star

Three poems by Mara Davis Price

Mara Davis Price is a born-and-raised North Carolinian, earning degrees in English and psychology from Barton College. They then earned an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. In recent years, Mara has worked as a domestic violence advocate, a paralegal for an advocacy program for Native Americans, and a copyeditor. They now work as an editor at a publishing company. During free time, Mara watches copious amounts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and enjoys spending time with their fiance, Christian, and their cat, Frankie.

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Myth of Creation

the sky is
full of 
my heart

I've sung moons
into that wine
black canvas

I've shredded them into
stars, spread them
like tablecloths

or death shrouds
over the red 
clay earth

everything that exists
is created
by those

who bear witness
(and when the sun 
goes down
I invent night)

please destroy me

oh little clouds grinning towards us,
console me
I yowl until each syllable sprouts teeth
and lodges itself into that groping wind

(we talk to old stars
hear them caterwaul
and watch them shrivel
      shrivel shrivel they shrink up) 

some things aren’t as simple —
    like you when you’re high, and 
your sadness 
ends up a record of what lays

heavy on both our hearts
a list of what gnaws
on these bones
like the moment ablution

turned pitiable
I've washed 
those hands
too many times

for there to be any hope left underneath
your fingernails. 
oh broken moon —
oh severance of a falling star —

will you tell me what you are?

Empedocles & Emily Dickinson

The former went splayed
into the belly of Mount Etna
to prove the only secret
the latter believed people keep. 

And for all we know, 
he still waits to be spat out. 

As for my ability to die, 
it has not yet been proven. 
I am made of too fine things, 
silt and sifted flour; my bones

rest at the bank of a blue river, 
untested by gravity or time. 

How lonely it must be for Empedocles,
to stare at a pinhole of sky
and hold his weighty secret. 
How reprehensibly long

life looks from where I stand, 
unburned by the answer. 

*From Emily Dickinson 1748: The only secret people keep / Is Immortality.

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