Episode 50: An Excuse for a Buffet

Episode 50: An Excuse for a Buffet

Present at the Editorial Table:
Kathleen Volk Miller
Marion Wrenn
Tim Fitts
Samantha Neugebauer
Jason Schneiderman

Engineering Producer:
Joe Zang

Love is in the air as the gang gets together on Valentine’s day to feature two poems by Emma Hine: “I Wake Up in the Painting by Rousseau” and “The Red Planet Counts Her Craters“. Tune in to hear the lamentations of several of our editors as they discuss Valentine’s day

Emma Hine is from Austin, Texas, and holds an MFA from New York University. Her work has previously appeared in Arts & Letters, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and The Missouri Review, among others. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works at the Academy of American Poets.

Listen on and hear the fate of these two pieces! Let us know what you think about this episode on Facebook and Twitter with #MarsBuffet

I Wake Up In the Painting by Rousseau

This time

he, the sleeping figure, I, the lion,

my pupils round in their egg-whites,

night-wind

angling his scent

dunewards. He has surprised me.

I never expected a human in the sand

like a god fallen

asleep,

a bare-throated mandolin on the pillow

beside him. I smell the striped shoulder

of his robe.

Don’t know

which path he took across the desert.

On the nightstand we keep a lamp,

a vase,

a digital clock.

Beneath the blue walls I hold the moon

in my teeth and breathe on it, feel no

devouring dread.

The Red Planet Counts Her Craters

The way Mars is bolted in place,

all she can see is the sky. She recites

red sky at night, sailor’s delight

until her atmosphere shimmers. She hopes

that from everywhere else,

she’s visible, the brightest storm brewing

in this big wide sea. She converts sensations

into units of distance and units of force,

so that each time a body collides with her,

she can add it to her catalogue

of impact: where, how hard, how long the tremor.

She lifts the oxide dust gently from a crater

and says asteroid at an oblique angle,

seventy-eight miles across.

She does this just by feel. No looking.

Which might be why she so loves the probes.

When they land, she goes as still as she can,

so they won’t startle and unlatch. She wants them

always charting her shoal plains.

When one enters her gravity too slowly

and bounces away, she wonders

what went wrong. She imagines it lost

out there without context, how it wanted her,

couldn’t touch her, or stay.

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