Marcus Wicker is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, and the Fine Arts Work Center. His first collection, Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), a National Poetry Series winner, was a finalist for […]
Marcus Wicker talks about his writing time.
Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like. —Will Smith Damn Will— they’ve got you sounding mighty Uncle Phil in these streets. Like the still calling the Ketel One cheap. How, where we started from is never done with our undoing. To […]
of suburbia in flux behind one of the town’s, count ’em, two mega high schools. The sometimes-tended-to nature preserve where green & green slide crisp between brisk handshakes, where a middle-aged Jimmy John’s driver suddenly halts his ‘98 Corolla, goes noiseless. Where the sun isn’t exactly booming, but it’s Sunday morning & I’m in my […]
I draw them in from a crowded street with a wink & an eye toward the big guy’s wallet. I sink into myself into my spot behind the cardboard box dropped— just here, a prop. Keep your eyes on the Ace of hearts. […]
My mind is playing tricks on me. —Geto Boys Will you miss the lone, stiff mister blue bird ghosting it through a two-light town, in which you raise your chicks or cocks in Gothic dens adorned in old doilies, rooster trinkets, a sweet aphorism, cross-stitched & hung above the […]
Pray without ceasing. —St. Paul What’s funny is that you think I can stop praying. That you think I take existence—blown dandelion across a philtrum—lightly, as irresponsible birdsong. As the wren, finch, chickadee & prairie warbler. As scarlet tanager, indigo bunting, laughing gull, trumpeter swan. As common sparrows outside my window canting […]
me Ishmael. Call me sailor. But not captain. Call me fishhook. Clean. Call me multipurpose fish scale weighing self-obsession. Call me fish tail in a siren’s silk sheets. Thief in the night. Buccaneer. Call me multipurpose fish scale singing motherfucker, then calling it good. Call me lukewarm algae eater upchucked. Call me match head struck […]