Picture Window
by Marina Pruna Moré

You and I are not thinking
about the willow tree,
particular in its rustle this fall.
We’ve squandered color,
lodged ourselves
black and white in argument.
I hold your words like hot wax,
slick ovals at first,
then sticky with burn.
You cool and harden,
smaller in resignation.
Our raked sympathy: a dry pile
in a corner. Missing our window,
a slant of sun dissolves
itself upon the rooftop
of our evening. Outside,
the canopies blacken to slumber
as I draw the curtain. <>


Miss Fortune Selects
by Marina Pruna Moré

she turns the wheel with her sooty toes
flicks the body of her cigarette
nearly out, departed to grey
scratching her pocked cheek
she slumps off the soiled cushion
to light another smoke

The copse translates the rhythmic wind to survival. The licks of the wheel are lost to
time, to tides and cycles that trick, fool us, mimic nature’s benevolent drum. A fire
begins on the farthest side, the ends of everything curl into black wrinkles and smoke.
The trees bow to their limit, and when they crack — <>


Remembering Prince
by Marina Pruna Moré

When Prince makes rain,
he makes it purple.
He makes it sonorous and fall with elegance.
When it’s over, the end comes twice.
The first with story. The second, history.

I don’t need raspberries or corvettes,
millennium parties or wild animal sounds
to envision this
small diamond of a man lifting
with his bold axon
an entire generation of sound.

But I want them.
It is all desire when it comes
to the artist with no name.
I choose crazy. I choose
sex. I choose speed and squealing
and this sweet life.

Indulgence isn’t careful or neat.
I learn this by watching his wet
and half-clothed body peel itself
from the stage with a thump,
leave behind an open-mouth of a woman.

Her hair is thunder,
her face the piercing sound of a lightning bolt
complete with grounded satisfaction and burn.

And I know
that he’s done it.
With his guitar, he’s reached up into
what was once a blue sky of a woman,
and he stirred and stirred
until everything she contained

expanded, overtook her and tumbled
out onto him and the rest of us.
If she were to speak again
she’d say thank you,
she’d say how dare you,
she’d say now do it again. <>


Remembering Whitney Houston
by Marina Pruna Moré

When Whitney died suddenly, what could Bobby do except rehear
the news, cry, and accept that all transitions are an illusion.

Perhaps he thought back to those days before their fame had died down,
back to when they blazed onto stage all diamonds and baggy pants,

back to when MTV helped rank the music on your playlist, when “playlist”
meant the song order you shared with your band before jamming out,

when jamming out happened and quickly turned into memory, no insta-
gramming-photo-booking-camera-tubing-you-you-you.

Nothing subtle in change, Bobby thinks, holding his small broken mirror
of a daughter. Putting those pieces back together, like reversing time.

All jagged edges and sharp turns back then, nimble, glossy, inviting:
how she vibrated. The perfect melody to his move, cadence to his high.

Together, they went swimmingly down, under, and away from sunlight.
Each an answer to the other, outside voices became garbled and distant.

And now the silence is like a door at an edge, solid but movable
And perhaps the cool cooing isn’t imagined. Perhaps it’s plainly song.

Unwritten song after song after song tumbling like stones down
a well to a dark and unrecoverable bottom. <>

Marina Pruna Moré  is a poet originally from Argentinean Patagonia. Now living in North Carolina, she received her MFA from Florida International University. Her work has appeared in Soundings Review, Hinchas de Poesia, The New Poet, The Hong Kong Review, Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do, And Don’t, Get Around in South Florida, and other journals. She serves as Coordinator for the Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise.