Opening Ceremony, Laura Marie Marciano’s second collection of poetry, is a memory-mending confession, coming clean with the kind of clarity to prepare for the prospect of parenthood. The lines trace back one life, before the creation of another. By-gone moments bubble into propensity with the brilliance to vindicate them from the speaker’s steel-trap memory.
In a fever dream I carried a wounded bird
all the way up a withered mountain
In return
I found you
Are we called to the cloud on screen
or in the universe, the memorial of sky
the December of June
honeysuckle wire flame
Like a red-carpet rolled out for the mind’s refusal to change, Opening Ceremony uses two bodies, in all their nakedness and indignity, as an elusive, intimate path forward. It is an unceremonious departure, the transience of the heart, and the ritual surrender. The lines move unblemished from the aching desire of summer’s end, New York, Los Angeles, adulthood, and finally parenthood, with the only constant being the speaker’s love, to whom the book is dedicated.
Your throat is tangled, New Yorker
in waxy black denim, somewhere
Between too quiet and never stops
Forehead tattoo like a burning halo
in a hollow town.
