Poetry By Marsha Lewis

Tim J Keegan CC




For Emily
 
Yesterday, my cousin sang in a laundromat 
in Kensington, her amber guitar returned to her, 
sang “I’m back and better than ever,” 
while machines spun her dirty clothes 
clean.  My second cousin, once removed... 
Many times removed, from under the overpass 
at Allegheny with her orange tent and cart, 
back to the years in Spring City when she was bitten by a deer tick 
but did not know. My grandmother’s sister’s granddaughter. 
 
We came from saintly matriarchs, 
gentle, laughing grandmas, devout and healthy 
as horses, their yards open and flowery and lush. 
 
When we visited, she played Radiohead songs  
in our hotel room, fingers deft, throat 
trilling out haunted tones across the balcony,  
me half-in the door, half-out, on the painted stairwell, 
Pennyslvania summer as green as my envy. 
 
II 
She fell faint and dizzy from the tiny brown tick,  
bitten in summer’s long grasses. 
Weakness spread through her legs. 
Doctors puzzled, confounded, 
but refused to admit their unknowing 
and again a woman was taken to an institution  
because they had no names for her aching 
 
(but no, she wasn’t a woman, 
she was twelve). I’ll ask her, tomorrow, 
what warm plant’s medicine infused her veins  
on july nights in that white bed,  
our grandmothers hovering like light  
above her hospital departure. 
 
Hair dyed unicorn-pink now, arms a map of healed scars, 
she’s playing Amy Winehouse “Back to Black,” - - 
“i died a hundred times--” 
a little crowd gathered around her, cheering her on. 
 
III 
 
Amid a row of crackhouses, her roommates 
carry out crates and make a table 
for our take-out of Jamaican oxtail. 
They sit on the steps while we eat, 
the two men, sharing their own stories  
of injury and prescription, of pain released in an opioid’s slow haze. 
Carpenter, construction worker, muscles pulled. 
 
I think of Robert, back in Virginia, 
the five miles he walked to get to work, 
how he soaked his sore hands in ice water 
after hanging poultry on the line for hours. 
How the labourer’s pain is the foundation of civilization.  
The shelter kicked him out when he quit. 
 
On this cool evening, spring breaks 
above crumbling pavement, broke-down cars. 
Emily sings into the polluted air. 
She refills my water bottle, 
brings out doughnuts to send home with me. 
 
We sit on the crates past dark. 
Through torn curtains, the lights in  
the busted-out houses shine like stars. ​



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Marsha Lewis was born & raised in South Florida. After years of traveling as a seasonal farmworker, she settled in the Philadelphia region, where she manages a small farm for the community, and in the winter, assists people with disabilities. She is currently in a liminal space in her home state, writing again and eating avocados off the tree. Her poems have appeared in Apricity, Red Weather, Gyroscope, Black Fox Literary Review, and Lily Poetry Review. Her first chapbook, Scattered Branches, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024.