After Admiring Her Mother’s Drawings Containing Hieroglyphics, Zipporah Dreams She Learns to Read in Her Own Way
Marc Tretin
My birth has wronged my God-addled brain
and only a lotus-faced hieroglyph
rising from the soil of the Niles flood plain
overcomes how my dead mom says with a sniff,
“You cannot even read the plainest words,”
but if I could spell “leap” with a cricket
and “prayer” as the sun awakened by birds,
and “fear” is two red eyes glaring from a thicket,
then my brain’s back lobe mixing up letters
is a cloudy sky obscuring the stars,
that trace God’s outline with a knowing ease
and reading would make my mom treat me better.
Though her incompetent womb left numbing scars,
her pictures pray for me—drive me to my knees.
Marc Tretin’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, Bluestem Magazine, BoomerLitMag, Burningword Literary Journal, Caliban Online, Common Ground Review, Crack the Spine, The Diagram, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Door is a Jar, Faultline, Free State Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Griffin, Litbreak Magazine, Literary Orphans, Lullwater Review, Mad River Review, The Massachusetts Review, Minetta Review, Moon City Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, The New York Quarterly, The Painted Bride, Paperstream, The Penmen Review, Pennsylvania English, Pudding Magazine, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Round, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Whistling Shade, Ghost Town Literary Magazine, Qwerty Magazine, Vox Poetica, and Willow Review, and he was the second runner-up for the Solstice literary magazine poetry prize in 2013. Marc is the 2015 winner of the Audrey Wasson and Carol Leseure Scholarship in Poetry. His poetry collection, Pink Mattress, has been published by New York Quarterly Press in 2016. Conferences Marc has attended include 92nd Street Y, Colrain, and the West Chester Poetry Conference.
He has studied with David Yezzi, Molly Peacock, Rachel Zucker, William Packard, and Emily Fragos.
Marc has an MFA in Poetry from Spalding University. He was an attorney in private practice and is now retired.