Marie Segolene

Agape (à la fois entre ouverte et sanctifiée)

For souls it is death to become water, and for water death to become earth. Water comes into existence out of earth, and soul out of water Heraclitus

He who prepares the earth

Keep my mouth open, will you?

So the mosquitos won’t breed

sequestered in stillness.

He who ploughs with a wide furrow

It is from my jaw, that the rain Feeds the crops

That we tend to like teeth

Smell my tonsils Ripe for the plucking

Begging Ceres when April comes Thanking her by September

Flies nest in the corner of my eye

Your tongue: a sickle We wait for the season, your head between my thighs, a gentle ache in our backs And our faces flushed from wine

He who plants the seeds

As you step foot in the earth of my throat I lavishly keep the wine inside my cheeks like a squirrel.

Your lips alone Might be the grace I recline for

The communion on St Theresa’s tongue.

He who weeds

Somewhere in Kentucky, salt drips erosion.

Upstate, I collect weeds with enthusiastic precision You would think it would prevent reoccurrence.

Yeast, the gift that keeps on giving, From the drippings: stalagmites calcify into delicate rocks,

The oils of your finger have the potential to interrupt & of course you touch anyway.

Like witnessing hunger, and returning to plenitude.

The oils of your fingers, now wet with clay touch me at the small of my back

As if your hands shaped me, what was my waist before your wet palms? Meat straight out of a can.

Your yolk dry on my chin! The glass re-filled And emptied.

Thing is with or without you, Tobacco will burn. (The same could not be said of god)

You know me, I tend to confuse the clay for the potter.

He who reaps

Knees in Lavender Sincere oils In the creases of the eyelids Sweat on the upper lip

I have befriended a handful Over bread and wine But what have I been sowing? If I have not heard from them since.

Where can I kneel, if not on your chest? A silence from which only silence can be reaped You open my appetite And apease my anger.

He who carries the grain

Some light pink fruits, close to yellow You peel to get to the sweetness They grow in heavy sun and spit

enough to get us out of bed

I wonder about you dryparched

I like to think that our embrace is purposeful Salt in the corner of your mouth drips

You bite, you reap, you Are my mouthful of sweet mayer lemons Leaves still attached and all A senseless tenderness,

I do not know what to make of you, Does this render you holy.

He who stores the grain

Your spine Akin to a dead fish My fork, looking for the marrow

I collect You leave

He who distributes the grain

Impatiently waiting for Sunday To share my confession So precisely rehearsed

10 Notre Pere 10 je vous salue Marie

Anoint my forhead

Marie Ségolène C. Brault (b. 1988 Montreal, Qc) holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia Cyber Arts from Concordia University (Canada). She is currently completing her MFA in Performance at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Marie’s work has been featured in Poetry is Dead Magazine and DRY MAGAZINE, and her books Proprioception (2015), Libation (2016), Aphrodite (2016) and Requiem (2016) have recently been published by Anteism. She has participated in several group exhibits, in spaces such as the Knockdown Centre, Pioneer Works, City Bird Gallery (NYC), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), 8eleven (Toronto), Projet Pangée and Never Apart (Montreal).

Marie recently took part in Conversations on Contemporary Poetics at Hauser & Wirth in New York City, she will be performing as part of Tempting Failure in London (UK), as well as completing a residency at BetOnest in Berlin, Germany in July 2018.