Sleetmagazine.com

Volume 14 • Number 2 • Fall-Winter 2022-2023

Mark Gregory Lopez

a dress

A bed of lies beneath the moon

          I make from scratch,

                                                   I wear it well.

                    The way the sharp eye

keeps the clock on washboard time,

                                                             I wear it well.

They buried my grandpa

                               before I was born, and I swallowed

a piece of his cancer

                                         when I was old enough to don sickness like a sweater.

                                                   I think I wear it well.

I scraped the sky to see the world in slow reprieve,

                                                             taking clouds to puff my hair into an ark.

I wear it well.

                    I let him turn my body

to a keen shred of metal,

                                                   scraps left over from torn-down streetlamps,

                                                             I think I wear them well.

The skin of the river

                                         like a shroud that tells me the currents

were never mine, still,

                               I think they wear me well.

Mark Gregory Lopez was born and raised in a city by the sea. He earned his BA in English and Bachelors in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He also earned his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His journalistic writings have appeared in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, UT Law Magazine, MusicOMH, The Weekly Alibi and The Bend Magazine, and his poetry has appeared in Borderlands, Juked, The Maynard and Bacopa Literary Review.