Mark Steudel

Mark Steudel currently lives in the Sandhills region of central North Carolina with his longtime girlfriend and two charismatic huskies. He works in fundraising for an environmental nonprofit and has had poetry published often, including in the Atlanta Review, Poetry East, Slipstream, San Pedro River Review, Borderlands, and Main Street Rag.

Drawl

I want to fall asleep on your words, to land softly in the pillow of your tongue as it draws out the vowel sounds to unprecedented lengths.
To lie there, surrounded by nothing but the intonations of your voice intoning God-knows-what.
I want tomorrow to steal away sometime later today, under the casual guise of taking a long lunch.
To recruit me as co-conspirator and, after some half-hearted hesitation, I want to surrender to tomorrow's siren song.
To suddenly find myself in tow, across windswept plains, into a surreal landscape of such alien utterances that it could be faking it for all I know.
And these could all be hired actors. And nobody even talks that way anymore, do they?
But it's not what is said, but how you say it, and everything you say is music to my ears.
I want to look around at the young people having fun in the grass as far as the eye can see.
I want to hear the music of the rivers effervescing into spring, and I want to decide it doesn't mean anything, really, beyond that irreducible language of desire.
I want to hear more. Read Proust to me. In the original French in an exaggerated accent. All seven volumes.
No, I promise, it's not too much. As a matter of fact, it's not enough by a longshot.

Moonshine

Even the whispering of the pines can be too much talk,but here's a glow that will dull the edge off the sharpest blade. You're convinced this world doesn't get you,
but suddenly it's all right. It feels good just to float away, holding tight to the sneaky-strong beams of moonlight that pull you to their source. This dimmer sunlight,
softened and smooth around the edges, is precisely what the doctor ordered. It begins to feel so surreal, that soon you're battling the haze, trying to recollect any moments
unaccounted for, some gap in the memory's narrative that might indicate a lapse. Is it possible, in your former sorry state, you did do yourself in and clear forgot all about it?
And perhaps heaven, after all, does take on a peculiarly lunar aspect. If that's the case, then this vista will remain with you later, sober and with no notion of how
you ended up in such a faraway place. Surely, this must be death because you don't ever recall feeling this warm when you were alive. You hold that thought tight as you
fall asleep. What more on earth could you possibly need?

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