Stacy Lynn Mar, Poet & Author

Hello and Welcome!

2011-08-02T16:01:00.001-07:00

Hello and welcome to the official webpage of Stacy Lynn Mar. Please use the links above and to the right accordingly for poetry, biography, and so on.

Many thanks to you for visiting and I hope you find good reason to stop by again very soon!

I often publish updates and places where you can find my new poetry, fiction, books, and other noteworthy projects in the "updates" section.

If you are interested in submitting poems or a full-length manuscript, you will be interested in stopping by Muse Cafe Publications / Muse Poetry Review.

I am always interested in hearing one's view on my poetry, particularly if you are moved or inspired (in some way) by my writing so feel free to contact me, I do answer in a timely fashion!

Conversing In A Black Cadillac

2011-08-02T15:56:00.001-07:00

This is the moment
When everything in my world
Boils down to one car ride.

All the lights of the universe
Were slowly disappearing,
The Gods of the sky
Turning the stars on,
One by one.

You turned to me,
Silhouette boy of night vision
And too much grit between your fingers,
And asked me what was in a poem.

How can one verbalize
That words are a juxtaposition
Of moods, memories, stolen moments,
When a strange boy has her knee
Knotted between the crook of his palm,
Kneading the flesh like dough.

This is a sort of moment
When all those unmarked postcards,
The parties you never got invited to,
The presents from friends who never came
Twirl down and about like unnecessary graffiti.

Tears, words, impalement of moon girth,
Like little white checks on a chess board,
All the important things I have to say
Stick themselves in the mud,
A playground fort of unshed annihilation.

(First featured in The Litter Box, 2010)

Of All The Ballerinas

2011-08-02T15:55:00.001-07:00

I just caught the North star with my tongue.

Their dancing makes me believe in such things,

The girls in fairy-tale attire, holding hands

And telling their legs they have to work on Saturday.

Stage light mocks the bows of the plastic pine,

Crisp mid-Eastern air taut with the smell

Of cinnamon bubble gum, old leather shoes.

I can almost taste the eggnog, sweet licorice

Of alcohol at the after-party promos.

Numb as an old man’s libido, my heavy shoes will abide.

The music is an inferno, hypnotic rise and fall

Of a heat wave where the young girls lift their

Innocence atop a graveyard of Noel’s chasing grace,

Dropping tomorrow’s homework and summer admission

To Brown and Harvard, or that belated trip to Spain

Into the dreams of their dancing toes,

A barren place where anorexia’s appetite has been misplaced.

The breath of the lady next to me is suffocating,

Avalanche of her obesity reaching across my seat,

And the Nut Cracker has come to life now.

He spins as if in orbit, crunching almonds and breading

buckeyes with peanut butter in a chocolate disguise,

Never noticing all the spinning limbs,

Greedy gifts, manhandling eyes of the dirty men

Who spy long, slim legs in white tights.

The history of Christmas is unwinding, it’s lies caught in limbo.

(First appeared in Nefarious Ballerina, 2010)

Polly Anna Wonderland

2011-08-02T15:44:00.001-07:00

I am not a participant,

Fingers knuckle deep

In the popcorn cup.

I am not the loud girl

In blond hair,

Strawberry lips flapping

Of mine, me, I did, I do.

I am a theatre ogre

Dressed in modern chick,

Zipper of my boots

Reaching towards the pulling

Hem of a pink checked mini skirt.

I am a mirror of eyeballs,

A chorus of old men,

Hello, how are you, ahem.

This place is too cold

For a fall night,

Screaming starlets too scared

For the silliness of sorority massacre.

I am a fist full of white knuckles

And the words of the women

At the ticket line,

A jolly laugh and a one liner,

A series of sighs about eating right.

Tonight I am happy to walk

The same streets with strangers,

The common ground where

Everyone connects,

An intersection of humanity

In this place where I become part

Of the bigger picture.

Part of me becomes a Celtic musician

In a highlanders world.

Silly witch of Salem,

Black fingernails and

An old wooden broom,

Shadow across a silver moon

Where Halloween celebrates it’s season.

I am dropping diamonds

And toads hair upon all the little houses

Where jolly gnomes chop

Ground worms for their soup.

Just a little beatnik and a

Whole lot of free soul,

Gatherer of life-stones,

Each a leaden memory,

I am stumbling steadily toward

The shore of some Polly-Anna

Wonderland-lakeside and tossing

All my worries to the fish and snails.

They all think I’m crazy,

Making wishes while the minnows smile.

(First appeared in Lit Up magazine, 2010)

Gods Of Chance

2011-08-02T15:42:00.001-07:00

This is the June of 3am,
The time of night when Summer
Lifts the skirt of her thighs,
A discreet dance of ‘rings around the moon,’
I watch atop my balcony the boats
As they make love to the laps of cerulean waves
And dream myself a constellation atop the water.

I imagine each woman is a piece of me,
Right down to my paint-stained poets hands,
When at night Monet whispers into my ears
The sins of each sunflower, the seedling, the lie.
How I try to mimic his short thrusts and strong strokes
Beneath the naked spark of a moon beam.

Sometimes when I paint, and paste, and rearrange
The magnetic parts of me, truth slaps me
Like a raw circuit of copper wire,
And I manage to believe I’m not married,
Have never born the noose cords of romance,
Dry as a dead rose petal, it’s browned thorn menacing.

I fall into the abyss of starving-artist reverie,
Pretending there’s no new lover in my bed,
Bathing my sheets the gasoline-stink of sex.
I listen to folk songs and try on the single life
Like a pair of old jogging shoes, lying empty
All these years, but awaiting another mornings run.

And I remember the Norse campus in my head,
The woman sentiment of empty pockets and dreams
Cracking the center of my core like antique China tea-cups,
How life found me living amongst empty yogurt cartons
And the bland taste of tuna fish straight from the can,
Amongst words upon lines upon notebooks of bleeding prose,
Useless without an agent, or so they preached it vehemently.

Back then I believed dreams were things you folded
And stuffed into your pockets, quotes from dead Presidents,
Classic vignettes of famous poets,
Haiku of the immoral Victorian feminists,
They were whims atop a bruise-stricken thumb nail
A penny-well toss to the Gods of fate and chance.

First featured in Mad Swirl, 2009

(featured in the poetry forum 08.10.09)

I Love You, Goodnight

2011-08-02T15:41:00.003-07:00

My heart, it is a metal comet
Spinning atop your fingertip,
Slipping along the surface of your skin,
Intrinsic, unduplicated, authentic in it’s beats.

I am there, though I’m not substantial,
Flashing before you at daybreak,
The pink on flesh you feel beneath your hands,
I fall across your abdomen like rain.

I twinkle, the resonance of starlight shadow
And a wrinkled photograph,
I lay there in your pocket,
A stow-away, a cat in the corner.

We are the biggest of my biggest dream,
You, with too much logic in your eyes,
My spotlight hero,
Dazzling in your jeans and in your sins.

My love, in messy hair and quiet freckles,
I take you as you are,
You, of cigarette ashes and nicotine breath,
You, of doubt, and your dirty car seats.

You are the abstinence for my hands,
Still holding, my tiny fingers still typing,
The emails that wind down to sweet nothings,
And the poetry that flows forth, the girth of my words.

I know you miss me most at night,
I know your hands are empty shells left floating,
And alcohol is the quicksand you drown
Your doubts in till dawn, where the sun
Catches our, “I love you, goodnight.”

(First appeared in Mad Swirl, 2009)

Small Boxes Closing

2011-08-02T15:41:00.001-07:00

Yesterday is a small box closing
Upon each one of my bones, those warriors.
Primitive, I am a shadow of the woman ancestor
Who sanctioned for me parts of herself.
Small hands, those tiny caterpillars that bloomed
And grew and wrinkled, and held on till time broke.
Bright blue eyes, wishing specters, unwilling participants
To the insubordination and inconsistency of faltering promises.
I am part of that woman-past, I am reminiscent of her girlhood.

Tomorrow is the mother part of me
In the way I plan and perceive, seconds are but a calendar
To the womb that grew, the fetus that kicked, the life that became.
Life was the steel in my backbone, the protrusion of my bellybutton,
And now time consists of the pieces of me spreading.
I am the everything-woman of harvested wishes and
Dreamscape-ideology, and an encumbrance of helplessness
When night pulls his carpet of stars to shine atop my teardrops.
And fear jump-starts my heart like an old motor, rusted but still breathing.

Then there are the times when I run out of words,
My brain stalls like a white palace, it’s lines linear, windows isolated.
These are the nights when I seal those long lost letters,
And pour glue onto the cracking part of myself.
Yes, I am that sensitive and brittle, his words crush me like ceramic.
Some nights I feel old, my heart an ancient acrobat who keeps spinning
Seconds into eternity, and then I think of my grandmother
And her grandmother, and I remember that part of me is the past.

Grandmother, you don’t speak to me so much with a voice anymore,
But you still live, I see your smile every summer
When the rose bush blooms, and I feel your bony hands pushing me along
When I wish to fall into the abyss of nothing and share with you the dust.

(First appeared in All Things girl in 2009)

The Good Girl Exhibit

2011-08-02T15:40:00.003-07:00

Summer is abloom,
And we make our way
Through the steady stream
Of side-walk passers-by,
to the small mom and pop,
A rail-road station of
Sometime yesterday
Where the young cashier girl
Bids her mothers wishes.

Old men carry in their canes,
Coffee extra black, ma’am,
And she taps the sugar bowl empty,
I observe, my eyes dancing among
The shelves of jarred jelly and
The lemon-spray scent of
Wood rotting, steady drip-drop,
Ceiling leaking like a faucet,
A dust-bunny brine of surplus treasure.

And my grandmother,
Never young in her rubber sandals,
Bobby-pins swimming the net
Of gray on black,
I watch her hands, wrinkled but steady,
Examine a can of beans,
Twenty-five cents, you can’t beat that,
And I swat at a lone knat,
His legs kneading a path through my arm hair.

I remember the days of my girlhood,
how my hands would finger
the magazine display shelves
Against the roaming eyeball
Of my fathers’ inhibitions,
Like a microscopic memory,
I’d carry the captions and headlines
Home with me: ten days to new you,
How to drive men crazy in bed,
New fall fashions, blond-lady in a red mini.

Hidden between my breasts,
Two flat areolas of immaturity,
And the thrifty feel of my wool sweater,
I’d slide those secrets of sophistication
Into my closet, two shelves below my shirts,
Three boxes back where the words gathered,

Because virgin Christian girls
Weren’t supposed to wear tight blue jeans,
Writing poetry under maple trees,
About backseats and football game bleachers.
We were never supposed to know
The six steps of a sizzling romance,
Twenty rules to a healthy sex life,
And of the one-night stands in Spain.

(First appeared in All Things Girl in 2009)

The Side Strip's Dark Tonight

2011-08-02T15:40:00.001-07:00

The secrets of this town are wrapped tight,

Bubble of baby’s breath in a pocket of cellophane.

There is a Ferris wheel spinning atop my tongue

And all the old ladies in fraying petticoats,

Smelling of cat piss and Good Will junk,

Stop to gawk. Their curiosity is bland,

Like half-cooked oatmeal or the fatty part of a pork chop.

I hear the spider-leg crack of their bones,

The thorn-stiff poke of arthritic motor-tick,

Noses twitching, necks shaking, gossip gurgling.

Their judgment feels more like pop rocks

In the moment you mix them with grape soda

And the world seemingly explodes inside your closed smile.

This is the summer of 2003 and there is nothing

Better to do than listen to Bush pull the spark plugs

On peace while the liberals plead at Gothesome Gates

And the conservatives dig landmines of personal debate.

The old ladies are so full of life now, canes scraping

Across the bubble-gum goo of heated concrete

Because they are old and frail, and the frail move

More slowly than the dog-handling pedestrians

And the women in red high heels who stand outside

The drugstore in short black skirts, waiting for the cats to call.

(First appeared in Breadcrumb Scabs Magazine, 2009)

The Jungian Approach

2011-08-02T15:39:00.001-07:00

I want a house with a glass roof,
The sky a reminder of the infinite,
Where Van Gogh can sneak his stars
Across the horizon of my make-believe,
And the edge of the birch tree
Can bend the hands of his limbs to invite me.

I want a house with mirror-glassed windows,
So I can forever walk the rooms naked,
A naturalist in my toes, tanned of sun,
I’d fill the rooms of my flesh, careless
The intrusion of a peeping Tom,
Eyes level to my summer lover, secrets shared.

I want a house built on stilts, apparition in air,
The sills filled with pink-candied hearts,
where the hummingbird dips her head to taste,
Lazy Boy recliner by the kitchen picture window
Where I can rest my hands to catch the rain,
Mediterranean falling through my fingers.

I want my living room to house a rose garden,
No harsh carpet to burn my heels or knees,
A few scattered dandelions, daffodils, sunflowers,
only the tender breeze of my breath to touch their petals.
Leather couch my center stage, a literati display
Where poets like Anne Sexton can sit barefoot,
Marlboro dangling, words falling, incarnating.

(First appeared in All Things Girl, 2009)

The Matter of Molecular Bonds

2011-08-02T15:38:00.001-07:00

Onto the empty porch of wood and soot
We walked circles across
The slats, never noticing how
The disturbed worms and centipedes
Vied for another second of solitude.
We stared at each other,
Eyes avoiding silence.
I always loved the way you sat,
Legs crossed, eyes braiding calm
Where my chaotic thoughts
Would bury their recovery.
Back then the house was empty,
An oyster shell of post-inhabitance,
You were old money manhandling
The fairy plums of my nomadic dream.
There's something nostalgic and aching
About rearranging furniture,
How a block of space is transformed,
New karma replacing the high-heel scrape
Of another woman's yesterday.
I asked you which room would be yours,
The technicalities of driving a steel
Screw through a patch of brick
For the picture you found in the dorm toss-outs.
Lover of my past, of my today,
Maybe we could stitch some new memories
Into this college town, bury some roots
By the shed where the fig tree spares it's fruit.
Find a way to illuminate the silence
With the banjo beat of Merle or Hank.
The seven-thirty showing was drawing near
And we couldn't keep our hands off one another
When Pink Floyd opened their bag of wishes.
What sequence of matter would be placed
In the empty space of all the other rooms?

(First appeared in Poor Mojo's Almanac(k) in 2010)

A Little Left of Reincarnation

2011-08-02T15:37:00.001-07:00

Lying in my attic,
Wanting to be interrogated,
There is a flower I maimed with a smile,
The spirit-longing of a blue-eyed belle
And an optimistic boy touching her cheek
As if awakened from a Greek enchantment.
A moment I’ve never quite experienced before,
Except perhaps in a chipped Victorian painting.
Maybe there was such a story.
I create these characters for an audience, only you.
So that if I snooze again amongst the dandelions,
My body lolling off against the crevice of porch rot
And the concrete slab of the sandman’s headstone,
I won’t be whisked away by a man of armor
To be sat atop a throne, undeserving,
A disheveled tear where my kidney’s quake.
And if my lungs shall stall in this make-believe,
Wrap me up in Chinese silk and wooden shoes
So that my daughters ancestry can become mine too.
Send me into the star-filled Apocalypse
In a Cinderella carriage, but leave the pumpkins out to wait.
So that my life girth can reach Narnia, or Nirvana,
Where the closet sings itself to sleep
And another body can become me.
The female part of yesterday, where life lies in wait
Of body parts, shoulders squeezing,
And then something new breathes into me.
Swoosh. Exhale. Await. Embody.

(First Appeared in All Things Girl, 2010)