by Mara Adamtz Scrupe
out beyond the blest kingdom
amongst the trackless traders & slavers & affluent technocrats
lands amassing & bomb shelters & clandestine
airstrips & marble-tombed
bathrooms & gated havens to get off on on the other side
of the wall lizards dart in & out or lie in heat benumbed
amongst the Burdock catch-spring
spurred ovate bolls/ reckless rule-less ghost moths skim
&lek/ scroll & whitecap billow& spray exploding
in quiver-pleasured olfactory raves & gullies out beyond
the blest kingdom
insect/ amphibian/ mammalian females choose their mates
whilst the males of the species
entice them uncontested/ none abstain in a homeland
convinced of its quiddities
I mark & mind an ancient détente as the eighty richest
chock-full ride it out from a distance
it’s a bad bad
business the way the wall says
inhale/ exhale expect nothing
as the dam diggers stem the flood over the faceless fence
& the wounded unwing-ed collapse & orange peacock-
eyed butterflies remind me
of rope & strand of knot & sign & climb
& hold on tight for dear dear
at the bottom of this breach
holed & don’t they know it up here though
on top between squab & hassock
common six-line racerunner skinks queue a line
from my chaise across the porch floor not stiffs
buried under a dune on the other side of a wall
but languid/ marking a border
they simply slip over
Mara Adamitz Scrupe is the author of five poetry collections: BEAST (NFSPS Press, 2014), Sky Pilot (Chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2012), Magnalia (Chapbook, Eyewear Publications, 2018) and a daughter’s aubade/ sailing out from Sognefjord (winner, Fledge Poetry Competition, Middle Creek Press, 2019). She is the winner of the 2018 Grindstone Literary International Poetry Competition, and the Brighthorse Press Poetry Book Prize for her manuscript in the bare bones house of was which will be published in 2019. Her poems have appeared in international literary journals and magazines and she has won or been shortlisted for the Kay Murphy Poetry Prize, Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, BigCi Environmental Fellowship, Erbacce Prize, Fish Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Prize, Bristol Prize, and the National Poetry Society Competition, among others. She divides her time between her farm in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains piedmont and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is Professor of Fine Arts and Creative Writing at The University of the Arts.