Poetry by Betsy Mars

      Justin Kern CC




Dipole Moment

from Madness, Rack, and Honey, by Mary Ruefle:
“A sense of center like a magnet attracting many odd filings”
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And here they congregate, the mind a weedy bank 
where debris snags at chokepoints, a tangle of memory, 
a palette for poetry, the common imagery: among them 
the redbuds, butterflies, cocoons, and blackberries, herons, 
the numerous moons, their curvature reflected in our fingernail beds, 
the fungus that thrives there, the seeds that shrivel, their centers dry, spare 
the cat on my head, the surface tension that cannot break
the distance between us, the decades-empty San Francisco fern bars 
and their cracked stained glass, long-gone spider plants, the echoes 
of what was once imbibed there, the one-night stands. Shards 
and polarized particles, the space between us all, 
the craving for connection, someone who attracts us
to the invisible field, re-orients us.

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Heart, Fixed
after Dorianne Laux’s “Heart”

The heart shifts shape of its own accord, she says,
but what if it becomes an axe when a bird is needed?
What if I mistake the bird for a harpie,
chop off the head, silence the throat of its song?

My heart has no mind of its own, just flinching chambers 
closing like the petals of a sea anemone,
drawing its feeble poison
back into itself, 
stung.

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Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Recent poems can be found in One Art, Quartet, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which was a Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. Betsy is currently working on a full-length manuscript titled Rue Obscure.
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