Your good-bye is a warning: watch the horizon or you’ll miss my return. It’s a worm in the belly of a kelp-tangled gull, sea lions sparking from rocks, hounds sent to hunt you down & bring me home; it’s white sails swelling, my breasts in your palms.
I wake to an empty shore.
II
By summer’s end, all that’s left of your face is how I imagine you that night: stumbling over stone & bramble. How many times you must have dropped the spool, small as a fawn’s heart; how you looked reaching in the dark.
III
Each night, an anchor lifts a little higher. I drift bed to bed, tell new lovers my city-girl mistakes: the downrigger weight ripped from its rope because I didn’t mind the water’s depth, my brightest lure gone. New names of fish swim over my tongue when I say them: seabream, needlefish, the black cod caught at two thousand feet, its forced union with light, how easily it pulls from the bone.
has many publications that include a four-part poem in Fairy Tale Review‘s 2023 Rainbow Issue, The Southern Review, The Arkansas International, where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the Southern Humanities Review, where she earned an honorable mention for the 2019 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in the Best New Poets 2017, 2015, & 2010 anthologies. Her full-length manuscript was a finalist for the 2022 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (Bordighera Press), a press that promotes the literature of the Italian diaspora, and has been longlisted for the Pleiades Editor’s Prize, the Crab Orchard First Book Award, the Sexton Prize, and the Miller Williams Prize.
Mary earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (2011), where she was awarded the Lily Peter and the Felix Christopher McKean prizes in poetry, as well as an Artist Grant from the Arkansas Arts Council. She earned her BA in English from California State University, Northridge (2007).
She has taught college English courses since 2007, first at the University of Arkansas, then at NorthWest Arkansas Community College, and now as associate/tenured faculty at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California (her community college alma mater).
