from i bloom in the dark: “crush/wound”

To set fire to veins is to scorch all fruits off the earth. A succulent desert is born. I eat ice cream every night, thinking, this is how you love in the middle of a dry season. Instead, the sugarmilk dissolves into water, into weight, and suddenly, we are no longer girl but ghostwoman. She wears her own topography, carves and decorates and hides all that she is. In an ancient mother tongue, this would mean supernatural grace. In this world, it only means, caution,

 danger ahead.

praise for i bloom in the dark…

“The untamed in me recognizes the untamed in them.” Marie Nunez helps me to recognize my wildness too, and to be grateful for it. These wonderful poems, prose poems, and text-art pieces often feel carried away into tempestuous worlds, but by a steely eye and a tender heart. I Bloom in the Dark is a treasure, its insights lasting far beyond individual moments, reminding us of the astonishing buoyancy of the spirit. 

   —Nance Van Winckel, author of The Many Beds of Martha Washington and Sister Zero.

I Bloom in the Dark continues a long and intense conversation with the dramatic monologue, and I think here  of Lorine Niedecker, Anne Sexton,. Louise Erdich and especially Louise Gluck, and the stakes in this important book  are the very essence of what we are and what we strive for. As Nunez lets a mother speak in the last poem: “Love is the many-bursted heart of right here, right now, echoing within this museum of hours, again & again & //again.” The dramatic tension in these three sets of amazing monologues is between nothingness and the words that make nothing something, in points of view whose issues slide in and out of one another. “Dancing around / an emotion is a striptease / I don’t enjoy,” one character says, and yet it cannot be avoided, for avoidance and confrontation the terms we so often live with. ”Waterfall hearts,” the father in this family exclaims, as we begin to understand our own.

—Richard Jackson, author of Footprints and The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems