Betsy Mars
Betsy Mars practices poetry, photography, pet maintenance, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press which she founded in 2019. In 2020, her poem was selected as a winner in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series. Her poetry has appeared in Sky Island Journal, One Art, and Autumn Sky, as well as numerous anthologies and journals. Her photos have been featured in Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Spank the Carp, and Praxis. Betsy is the author of Alinea (Picture Show Press) and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz (Arroyo Seco Press).
Shelved
I bookended my year with death.
And in between there were volumes.
Slim paperbacks, underwritten.
Graphic novels with their sudden turns.
Faulkner-like passages where nothing
seemed to go on forever, and then
a sudden end. There were crime novels
where the culprit got away with murder.
Almost-too-good-to-be-true stories
that always end too soon. Other lives
soaked in so much drugs and alcohol
they put Hunter S. Thompson to shame.
I’m not putting the blame on the authors,
but I would have liked some different endings.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 