Amy Marques 

​Date Night

after Marina Abramovic’s The Witch Ladder

His
He was past caring if she noticed that he didn’t care for what passed for art these days. An old cord with feathers stabbed through it? Any child could do that. In fact, he had done the like as a child. He’d picked feathers around the chicken coop and poked them into cracks in the wall, horse bridles, the weave of the hammock that hung on the porch. And he’d even used different types of feathers and patterns sometimes. He’d known how to at least find good ones: long and firm and spotted and speckled and brown and golden and white as grandma’s fake teeth after they’d soaked in baking soda and vinegar. This? Any kid raised on a farm had seen better than this.

Hers
She yearned to touch it. The witch ladder, that is. Not the glass. The roped cord was fine, but she wondered what it would be like to make one from knotted hair; hair streaked with gray and white and long enough to hold the memory of heartbreak and disappointment. She counted the feathers. Fifty. Some of them were almost beautiful. Most were a little frazzled and even broken at the quill. Some barely had vanes, they looked like a cat’s fur after an unwanted bath: wilted, unbecoming, but still containing a dignity of sorts. Maybe the feathers were omens. Maybe each feather was knotted into a spell that shaped a year, protected its owner. Maybe each was a birthday gift to children and children’s children: a promise for new seasons to begin. Maybe the protection wears off at fifty. Maybe that is when you gain the power to knot your own spells. 

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This first appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly.

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Iron Trap

Lucia wishes she could forget to layer thin cotton to protect clothing from the iron’s soot. She wishes she was so slow, coals cooled and couldn’t straighten wrinkles. She wishes she pleated irregularly, so mama couldn’t wear the pink skirt to church and instead wore the orange with the too-tight waist that gapped unbuttoned and needed a ribbon to hold it together. She wishes she over-starched collars and left little triangles on snow-white cotton. She wishes her mother didn’t succumb to melancholy and could be trusted to remember to leave her bed, start a fire, change the baby, talk sense. 

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This was previously published in Dribble Drabble Review.

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Going Nowhere

Father said her place was near family. Father said if she wanted more schooling, he’d build her a school next to the farmhouse. Father said she could be a schoolmistress, teach the neighbouring children, inspire young minds. But she shouldn’t aspire to leave the farm, to live in the city, to be on her own. Father said he was going to the city for further medical tests. She could come, someone had to come. Mother had too many little ones to tend to and another on the way. Father said the city was big. Father said it was difficult to navigate and too much for a single young woman, even if it was 1940. Father said she shouldn’t go anywhere without him, might get lost without him, shouldn’t leave his side. At the hospital, Father slept. The doctor said they needed to keep father over several nights and was she able to find her way back to the boarding house? She said she would be fine. She rode the buses: looping routes, memorizing street names, mapping the city in her mind. She studied the women who walked purposefully down sidewalks, into offices, clinics, and schools. She found the boarding house, her stride, her daydreams, her soul. She tried to tell Father when he woke up, when he sat up, when he was discharged. Tried to explain that she needed to be here, in this city that felt like home. Father said she didn’t know what she was saying. Father said it was time to go home. Her place was near family, Father said.

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This was first published in Raw Lit.

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Nobody Uses Umbrellas in Eugene, Oregon

You’d think that in a place where rain is more norm than exception, everyone would choose to be prepared, but nobody carries an umbrella in Eugene, and nobody keeps pace with time as it rushes by and stands still at every instant. How could we as it is we who change pace, not time. Yet we regret how youth is wasted on the young as it was wasted in our youth when we allowed our grains of sand to spiral down the hourglass, shifting and morphing and swirling memories, dragging our childhoods away. But then we hardly noticed, because time is an owl, a silent hunter who, when satiated, perches deceptively wide-eyed and fluffy cheeked, calling the who who that echoes in our thoughts as they float as half-formed clouds, suggesting shapes that are easily blown away. But that is not a bad thing because we are houses shaped by the time that inhabits us, not constrained to what we might have once been designed to be, but expanding beyond our original facade, adding rooms, breaking walls, deepening foundations, reaching towards the heavens and, tentatively, opening our doors in welcome, hoping time won’t run out.

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This first appeared in Wild Roof Journal.

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You Breathe Through Your Mouth Beneath Your Surgical Mask

Because maternity wards smell like dorm bathroom bins when all the girls are taken by their periods and everyone is too tired and too annoyed to empty messes into dumpsters. Because birth and death share a scent. Because everything is too bright, too white, too stark: lights, walls, sheets. Because blood and sweat and urine and shit usher new life into the world, then seep and ooze and trickle as life makes its way out. Because even though you scrub and brush and wipe with obsessive zeal, even though you drape yourself in the assurances of expertise, the metallic smell of fresh blood lingers in the halls of the surgical wing, clings to nostrils, haunts instruments.

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This was first published in Ghost Parachute.

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We Live in Purple

We live in the not-dark, almost-dark that casts no shadows, that is all shadow, that pops with graffiti saying I was here, I was here, I was here, and smells like the groan and moan of a back alley in the rain, fresh as French fields of lavender. Soft purples. Light purples.

We drape mage capes over our shoulders, pulling in the colours of the night, the bits of light that add a violet hue, that point to stars, that whisper, that shout their presence. 

We eat the delicate eggplants, sliced and softened like the dark bruises on our skin, in our souls, the ones that heal past angry scars and into lines that trace our trajectories, like the tributaries of rivers in the maps of our narratives.

We love the crown with plastic jewels and beet macaroni that endows us with the power we had as kindergarteners, the power and certainty we miss as our skin thins, purple veins shining our vulnerabilities, as our hair fades to gray, to white, and our loud presence that screamed, that took up space, disappears into the spaces we couldn’t see before we shrink into beetles, into moths, into dragonflies with transparent wings.

Who want to fly. To quietly sparkle. To rest. To belong.
​
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Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She has been nominated for multiple awards and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is the editor and visual artist for the Duets anthology and has an erasure poetry book coming out in 2024 with Full Mood Publishing. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.