From Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

Some days she wanted to be as honest about herself
as Frida Kahlo. Let those caterpillar eyebrows
flirt with each other until they smooched in the middle of her nose,
She would wear that mustache like gossamer, sweat
with those tacky beads on the dark hairs of her lip.
This is the way I look, she could preen, and tickle
the two cockatiels on her shoulder who would pin up
her brazen portrait on the wall while the two green budgies
on her belly would look this way and that. Me and my parrots,
she could croon, me and my parrots and my cigarette and my ring.

 

—

This selection comes from Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, available from Dancing Girl Press! Purchase your copy here!

Lois Marie Harrod’s 13^th and 14^th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State).  She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.org.

Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.

From Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

Off

He’s off, he’s really off, he’s so far off he’ll never
come down, been off for a week now, no, two
weeks, the water’s deep, he’s so far gone he’ll
never come up, he’ll probably be off the rest his
life, off to Omega and no insurance.

I’m off too, she said. Outtahere–off, if he comes
home oiled again. Get off of me, she said, I mean
if a man is going to act like that, I’m gone, away,
off the shelf, absentee, off before you off me off
like a sock, you’re off your rocker, you know
that?  Off your nut. Off your trolley, call 911.

That’s way off, he said, just because I’m off the
wagon doesn’t mean I don’t love you no more.
Oh yeah, she said, Oh yeah, he said, and he took
off his shirt and cuffed her.

I’m off, she said, I’m really off, and she should
have gone, she should have gone.

 

—

This selection comes from Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, available from Dancing Girl Press! Purchase your copy here!

Lois Marie Harrod’s 13^th and 14^th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State).  She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.org.

Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.

From Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

Marlene Mae Contemplates Nihilism

My mother wasn’t evil,
just clean. If money were gold
dust, she would have wiped
it away. Filth was the root
of all uncivil. What would
the Ladies think
when they ran a gloved finger
along a shelf and dabbed up
unclean spirits–
and in the preacher’s house?
Every Saturday
she practiced
her homeopathic remedies,
razed those little imps
with her Dirt Devil.
We children had to clean
to be clean, my job swiping
the dining room chairs
into the immaculate
forever, difficult
when I liked
to watch dust dawdle
in the sunbeam–
wasn’t I Jesus’s little shaft?
And who among us
can wipe away mortality?
When she found a speck
on the spindle of my father’s chair,
she said nothing
will come of you,
which considering all she scoured,
seemed impeccably true.

—

This selection comes from Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, available from Dancing Girl Press! Purchase your copy here!

Lois Marie Harrod’s 13^th and 14^th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State).  She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.org.

Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.

From Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

Marlene Mae Thinks About Her Hair

Her own. What had been said.
She was blonde, a blonde to make a bishop
kick a hole in a stained glass window,
said Raymond Chandler when she
passed the diner. No, a suicide blonde,
dyed by her own hand, said Saul Bellow.
taking a swig of his coffee. Actually,
she was brunette, the kind gentlemen
prefer not, but marry. I’m not
offended by dumb-blonde jokes,
Dolly Parton told her in the hair salon
because I know I’m not dumb and I know
I’m not blonde. Once she had been a redhead,
but she knew she wasn’t smart enough
to get rich, so she would never be an auburn.
Under it all, she was beginning to go gray,
but not Spalding Gray gray. Spalding didn’t dye his
because he was afraid of dyeing, certainly
a gray area for one who died by his own die.
More men than you imagine die by their own hair.
Now Marlene’s father had gone bald as a Spalding baseball,
and years ago her mother would have been a blue head,
but now she was white with the righteousness of an old woman.
Raymond Chandler wouldn’t dare mention her
age. If truth is beauty, how come
you didn’t have her hair done in a library?
Lily Tomlin asked her on the bus, not understanding
that creating a truth is a tedious process,
especially a permanent truth, and what truth
is more permanent than hair.
Still beauty draws us with a single hair,
says one Pope or another, justifying no doubt
the hair of the dog that bit him. Don’t ask a barber
if you need a trim.

 

—

This selection comes from Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, available from Dancing Girl Press! Purchase your copy here!

Lois Marie Harrod’s 13^th and 14^th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State).  She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.org.

Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.

From Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

Pitching Headlong Into Her Own Kitchen

 

Marlene Mae could still smell
her mother’s
zuppa d’amore
simmering on the stove,
all those tomatoes
and thick kisses coming
to a slow boil
behind the high beams
of that
extra virgin
oily Chrysler
where she
had first tasted olives
so many falls
ago. You were
my mistake,
her mother had told her
when she was twelve.
An hour afterwards
he ran out of gas,
and they had to hoof
if back to town,
the rain coming
down like rosemary,
and all the way
he talked
about his mom
and her
quick dishes.
She knew then
she would never
marry him
whatever it was
he had
taken from her.

—

This selection comes from Lois Marie Harrod’s chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, available from Dancing Girl Press! Purchase your copy here!

Lois Marie Harrod’s 13^th and 14^th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State).  She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.org.

Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.