Marly Youmans is the author of fourteen books of poetry and fiction. Her latest poetry collection is The Book of the Red King, following the narrative of a transforming Fool, a mysterious Red King, and the ethereal Precious Wentletrap (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) Her latest novel is Charis in the World of Wonders.
I knew him long ago—even at first, I sensed that he was the center of his world, and that he expected all good things to come to him. You see, he made stories out of words, and he knew what was supposed to happen. You were to happen to him. You were to come to…
Homage to Frederick Buechner The thorn was bronze and wonderful to see,Though no one’s safe around such scimitars That escalade against the very sky. Yet scimitar by scimitar it rose,And being made so barbed and barbarous, Perhaps it meant no harm but harmed by chance. Woodcutters could have axed and hacked the treeTo toss a greenwood crackle…
This morning she woke at 4:00 a.m. with an image in her mind; she had been dreaming of walking up the aisle of Christ Church toward the white Gothic altar. As she had done many times before, she was bearing something tall and weighty. In dream, it was not the processional cross but a lovely…
She was my strangest friend. She saw the dead on the day they died. They stopped by her house on the way to the Jordan. Sometimes she saw a globe of light emerge from her body—bright like a miniature globe lightning. God talked to her, joshing in a voice like her own. I always wondered…
She was beginning to mislay our names And also where she came from, who she was— Her childhood inside house and orchard walls, The fruit as warm as sunshine on her palm: The words that should have held the world fell back. Yet in her gestures, there was mystery And something luminous that tried to…
The blade, the cuts, the sighs. Inner pith grown hotter. A vase of injured limbs. Do this to resurrect: Rinse and gash, repeat. Hammer till fibers split. Blossoms’ bee-swarm (hurt-flecked By memories of heat) All loveliness and grit… Life rises from mangle, From stems slashed at angle.
In childhood’s realm, I found a prize in earth: It was a tiny king and tiny queen Arranged upon a palanquin of gold, My memory insists they’re beautiful, The metal robes, enameled faces, crowns As sparkling-bright as cleft and burnished gems. The soil had changed the iris of an eye, And so the king had…
