Betsy Mars
Betsy Mars is an LA-based poet and recently launched Kingly Street Press, releasing her first publication (Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife) this past October. She is an avid traveler and animal lover, which doesn’t mesh with her animal family. She is the product of a professor and a social worker, so she comes by her love of language and bleeding heart rightfully. She has been published online and in a number of anthologies, and is very proud of her first chapbook, Alinea, published by Picture Show Press in early 2019.
At the End of the Tunnel
There’s a seamless room, glary –
cornerless. A blank slate.
It is reflective – it could be peaceful –
but then there’s ivory.
And that makes me think of elephants –
tusks, and blood, and dying
leathery bodies baking.
Or enamel, which could be porcelain,
but then there are teeth –
susceptible to cavities, the drilling
and the smell of burning enamel, the filling
leeching toxins into my already polluted body.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 