“Interior Walls” by Marlene Grand Maître
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Interior Walls” by Marlene Grand Maître, part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.
Interior Walls
By Marlene Grand Maître
Interior walls relish chaste daytime trysts with ceiling and floor,
woo them with hollow-voiced lingo: stud, joist, plumb bob.
Their stance military, walls are 24-hour border guards. Shapely
floor lamps, plush cushioned couches fail to seduce them.
Windows are walls’ spies to track what they keep at bay:
the always-in-flux hinterland muscling in.
Daily, they watch how we primp and lament. Self-effacing, walls
are baffled by the spell mirrors cast. By our facade-shifting.
Flesh punctured to hang paintings and mirrors, walls remain stoic,
relive their making: thud and whine, hammer and saw.
Keepers of secrets, of fear’s scent, they quake in the kitchen as plates
are thrown. As a fist punches a wall, inches away from a face.
All night, sensing an insomniac’s struggle to sink
into their bone-deep swaddling, bedroom walls edge closer.
They have a dim memory of kinship with limestone caves,
paintings of buffalo chased by half-human hunters, tailed or beaked.
Honoured to be used by sun as canvas for its abstracts, they are wistful
at night. Living room walls shiver in thin coats,
covet night skies—to be crowned by stars,
close at hand to feather and pelt, paw and wing.
Copyright © Marlene Grand Maître
Marlene Grand Maître has had two chapbooks published, most recently Wild Kin (Raven Chapbooks, 2023), and Cancer’s Rogue Season (Frog Hollow Press, 2020). Her poetry has also appeared in many literary journals and in ten anthologies, including I Found It At The Movies (Guernica Editions, 2014), and Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press, 2022). One of her poems was selected for the LCP’s Poem In Your Pocket, 2022). She is on the Board of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series Society in Victoria, BC.
Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members.
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