Marlowe Jones

Selected Poems

Ode to the Weenie Roller

and then think about the hot dog roller. that’s something marvelous. something obscene, too. the sheer amount of engineering dedicated to keeping these cylinders of dubious meat at a uniform temperature for extended periods of time on the scant amount of power you can drain out of any given municipal power grid. but the obscenity is the marvel, right? the care the attention the love put into making something not very good as good as it possibly could be as long as it possibly could be anywhere it possibly could be. the dustiest backroad in the driest desert county no one’s ever heard of. even there. even there you can pull into some faded postcard photograph and there’s a hotdog. twirling away. might even have diced onions if you’re lucky. and you wanna rail against the cultural homogenization inherent there within but also: what a monument to the lengths we go for love.

Vivarium 

We are in a terrarium. We are from Outside. Or, our parents are from Outside. Or, our many times great grandparents are from Outside. They were scooped up in a trowel. They were scooped up with the dirt. We do not remember Outside. Some of us do not believe it exists. We can see no dirt, no leaves, no detritus to eat outside the glass. There are stories. Of a world with no glass walls. But that world would freeze, or desiccate, or drown. Our glass box world is stable. Nothing changes, day to day. No one freezes. Only the small ones are eaten, and never all of them. We are safe, we are safe, and there is no Outside.