Marsha de la O on Poets Cafe
Marsha de la O’s upcoming book from Pitt Poetry Series is due out in Spring 2019. Antidote for Night, won the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award and was published by BOA Editions. Her first book, Black Hope, was awarded the New Issues Press Poetry Prize. She has published extensively, including recent poems in The New Yorker and the Kenyon Review. De La O lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poet and editor Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and edit the literary journal Spillway.
I Have Not Said If I Believe
S
he sprang out of the pine plank table
at Nana’s house, a witch with a rope
around her neck and all the havoc spilling
out encoded in our DNA. I studied
a dipping barometer and felt dirty beneath
my clothes, a bone fingered and sucked.
Mother favored gray for me, not that
it mattered a flip. Elder brother carried
our witch sewn in a vein in his thigh.
I did not think she hammered there.
They set a match to sixteen candles.
She was hung not burnt, he announced,
pressure falling, needle notching
toward dimensions where a witch
is hanging still, her ankles stretched
longer than human, she had six
children, her name was Lydia. He started
the song for ha-ha. Never been kissed,
crooned first brother, lost count, cracked
the other, sally, sally, I muttered while
mother’s mouth goes darker and
tighter. Hurry up and blow. Everyone
laughed when the flames died out.
from Antidote for Night (BOA Editions 2015)