Marita O’Neill’s poems address the experience of being stuck in different ways. First, she imagines the feeling of a trumpet who knows the “yes” and “sloe gin fizz” of music, but is now untouched in its “suitcase” and longing for touch, for breath to lift it into sound. “What am I but a husk of prayer” it asks, but then there is its actual prayer: “Find me.”
“Late March Moon” brings us to that season when we often feel stuck on the cusp between winter and not-yet-spring. The speaker balances on a cusp too. She knows loss and grief, but also knows that something new is astir. The metaphor of maples being tapped for syrup seems perfect. There’s a puncture, a wound, yes, but also the promise of a sweet flowing to come.
Marita O’Neill lives in Portland with her dog, Sweetpea. She received her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has had poems published in the Maine Sunday Telegram’s “Deep Water” series, The Cafe Review, Smoky Blue, Deluge Press, Maine Arts Journal, and LEON Literary Review. She has a forthcoming book Wild Nest, No Prison with Deerbrook Editions in the spring of 2025.
Betsy Sholl, MAJ Poetry editor
Trumpet’s Lament
Today as I wake, I can’t remember
the notes my pistons make, can’t hear
their bourbon shadow, see their footprints,
brash and breathy, can’t feel their gait,
erratic and tiptoe, leap through and over
the staves that restrain them. Part duck,
part car horn turned sloe gin fizz, their
sounds ease, they welcome, they cool,
they yes yes me into the burn that wakes
and heals the ashes into something whole.
My bell, golden violet, is all silence.
Breathless, it gapes, swirls out out, gasping
for spit, for wind, for slide, for lips
to mouthpiece, aching as if a head upturned
hungry for rain. My valves yearn for swing-
step and sway of fingertips: their press,
their chassé and compression. Where
is the water that makes the river flow?
Where is the touch to still, to give
voice to this pacing, feral and mapless?
Who am I without wind, without hand-
wrapped brass, without that particular
embouchure and heat? What am I
but husk of prayer, song, and woe?
O sounds of blue broken, O hollow
caverns of soul slouch with no words
in its suitcase, O squawk and screech
that can’t be contained, find me.
Late March Moon
Sugar Moon, Lenten Moon, Winter Too Long Moon. Moon That Calls the Syrup from the Trees, Moon Urging Spring Worms out of Blindness into Sun. Musky Moon, smelling of manure and things deferred to the ground. Moon of Dead Things Coming Back to Life. Lazarus Moon. Lazarus who got that magic whistle through the darkness. Whistle to come back. Is that story true? Because I’m haunted, Moon, all these years later. That man I loved with the dirty blond curls and awkward body. It’s the anniversary, and he seems to be whistling his way through that shadowy boundary to say hello: a Spinners’ song on the radio, I’ll be standing in a coffin (whenever you call me) . . . I’ll be around. Is he asking me not to forget? To forgive? Something stirs. Something searches worm blind, speechless and hungry. Something kicks its head back and stomps its feet, laughing like a crow. Something insists this Fasting Moon must be more than fallow. Whatever it is, it smells like earth after snow melt, pungent and musky, a thing that pushes through. A thing supple like sugar tasting of bark when it’s stabbed and twisted into giving something old and essential of itself.
Charles Brooks, Yanagisawa Saxophone, for Architecture In Music.
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