I come from marble people.
We are foggy edges and ribbony centers.
Twisted filament spirals. We are clearies and cloudies;
sunbursts and crabclaws; catseyes and comets.
In 1930, our Dada, great-great-grandfather
Claude C. Grimmett, cofounded Master Marble
Company with John F. Early and John E. Moulton
in Anmoore, West Virginia.
I come from molten globs and slugs cut and
cooled. I come from screw conveyor and two grooved
cylinders spun alongside one another.
We are sorted by our opacities and
transparencies. We are infinity swirls: latticed, solid
core, divided core, ribbon core, ribbon lutz, coreless.
We are stored in polyvinyl bags, heat sealed through
the centers of the headers.
¤
We play for keeps. Our knees do not touch
the chalk of the circle. We shoot from our fingers. We
lay one knuckle on the ground as anchor and rule.
Our ancestors made marbles from clay rolled
between their hands or rocks smoothed by the ocean.
All of civilization held their own alleys and throws.
¤
Marble stands for body. Chemistry shows up
as colors there. Cobalt for blue. Iron oxide for green.
Manganese for purple.
I come from surplus amidst Depression.
My people are depressed.
We have been knocked and jobbered by stomps
and quicksies. We carry marbles in our mouths. At all
costs we avoid mumbling.
We watch fireworks from the patio of the psych
ward. We feel like we are stuck in boxes. We dream
our teeth cut us open. We throw ourselves from the roof
of the State Hospital.
We lack the freese machinery of our rivals—
their offset rollers, their smoothed poles. We are
unimproved. We cannot be mistaken as theirs.
The we of me is right here at my cutoffs and
crimps. My u-shaped seams. The marble is me learning
the quiet extent of our illness.
I went looking for my family and found toys I am
trying to ask questions.
¤
A marble is a willful structure, though not
impervious to chips, flakes, and scratches.
The conclusive thought of a marble is look at me.
See here my backlit moonie. Gleaming and antique.
My point of vulnerability is a sentence that ends
with I hide.
Mother says I am made of the best of her and
Father. Unlike the others. I resent the conundrum
of wellness. I know scattering. Watch the crack of my taw
splay into mibs.
She wants me to make you, little duck.
Of course the marble is embryo. I didn’t ask to
turn out this way. I didn’t mean to summon you. This
is the circle I walk. I carry two pouches in my gut.
You are one of me I’ve kept you inside me my
whole life. My dear peach and emerald patched comet.
You are better than onionskin; blasted as aventurine.
I never said you weren’t astonishing. I never
said I was unafraid of your becoming.
¤
Our marbles return to us, settle at the back
of our throats. Rise up as we cry or utter a difficult truth.
The marble is me learning I am hardening
to possibilities. I am fantastical dreams of injury
and babies. I am fertile and disillusioned with
roundness.
I don’t want to reconcile creator with mother.
I come from the whole set my Dada made lined up
in the box that slides from its cover.
Their glass is my glass. We are the forced speed
of chemical injection. Sand, soda ash, lime, cullet mixed
in a furnace-driven tank. We began in meltdown.
Lauren Mallett’s (she/her/hers) poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol,The Seventh Wave, The Night Heron Barks, Sprung Formal, and other journals. She lives on Clatsop land of Oregon’s north coast. www.laurenmallett.com