so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel

      St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from all the light spilling from the square’s pavements, bursting from the shiny pink balloons and piles of lace-edged hearts. There were white roses heaped on the steps and daisies dripping from the fountain, sunflowers spilling over the stone slabs. There were more flowers than people— so many the crowds had to step back to let in HGVs and transit vans, men pulling roses from the backs of lorries shaking their bald heads and wiping roses from the corners of their eyes, speaking in quiet voices that were roses, too. And why not pile flowers on the stone floor, why not pile stems, string and plastic— things that can be held and understood? No matter how I try to turn this afternoon, no matter how I try to touch it, press it,...

    What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a motorcycle—drenched in the day’s sweat like a soldier returning from battle, coming home to me.       Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she’s swatting bugs and dodging storms. Her poetry collections, Let Go of the Hands You Hold (2021) and Box Office Gospel (2023), are published by Mercer University Press.

/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /