Marion Panizzon is a US/Swiss lawyer engaging in advocacy on sustainable development. Marion has travelled extensively to Africa. Her poems cultivate an enduring sense of urgency for our boundaries-planetary, physical, psychosocial. Marion’s poems have been published by the Tiny Seeds Literary Journal, the Swiss Poets’ Association, Poets’ Choice and Frogmore Press.
Artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz
Lilly-Up-The-Alley
Lilly-of-the-valley, there is more for you to carry
Than a crystal veil crowning your bejeweled head
There is more for you to lose than a state-of-mind
A walk up the alley, breaks your stem
A talk among allies cracks your neck
A march down the aisle, airlifts your belief
Shake off that snow icing your petals
Shiver when wearing engraved metals
Shrink at the words sweetening the hymnal
Frown at the droplets dripping from ivory goblets
Flinch at the groom’s request to quench his thirst
Faint at the fragrance of swooning incense
Run away from harpsichord’s icy faucets
Before you sorrily drown in dew
You’ll hang wasted from a wedding chapel pew
Chose melting over flooding to escape
Since standing submerged is eternity on the verge
Lilly-up-the-alley, your crying is heard high up into the valley.
Dodgy Dogwood
Driving drifts in gentle whisps
Fragrant clouds of scent
Linger as if it were someone else
Mask a bark torn into furrows
Dropping pain and eviscerating sorrow
Soft wood black as licorice
I root for your precipice
Searing elastic cast
I seek entanglement in a pure liquor flask
Slender branch, whip my behind
Blossoms protrude a heavy lid
Supple twigs, flip my wits
Move away to pollinate another elf
Subtle smell of decaying earth, twist my legs
Pelt the bark to rock my thighs
To the sound of you and I
Pink ribbon glows and foregoes
The pains of the Pisgah forest echo
Surrender to the sighs of Shuckstack mountain highs
Unaware of reddening your Appalachian hide
Heroes whisper to the dogwood plying
Elbows, wrists, feet and members
Playing painfully to the orchestra in the pitch darker pit
My wit endures the final hit
How I wished the dogwood spoke to me
If not so now, so in two years
How I wish I could preserve the stare
And knew how to evade his probing glare
When the dogwood blossom withers
The leaf shivers, the house quivers
I die.
Yeast
A tribute to W.B. Yeats – “It only works if you compete with fate”
I squeeze that last drop of patience out from the lemon zest
I crawl into acid insides, to rip out slimy flesh
Pale green loathing flushes down my throat
I thought I had let go
I beat the sugar to a white fury
I mount the eggs to an instable Everest
I stir in the flour without raising power
Unmotivated baking powder
I dreamed I had been on top
I sift the starch to make up for an unreliable gluten
I angrily wait for some results
I stop stirring the dough, it needs to go into its mold
I forget my story, I am ready for the next blow
I add salt to the cake without any meaning
Other than being eaten
I beat the dough to death
I exhaustingly long for rest
I can’t believe I’ll be outrun
It is rising without compromises
I admire the uninterrupted life of yeast
I cry at the thought it will be complete
In the middle of an oven, thousands of crumbs stick together as one
I abhor to declare, done!
Guest gather around this infuriated chef
It never hurt to be a cake.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 