Natalie Marino

by Natalie Marino

I am standing in the corner of a clean
museum where there is a replica
of UCLA’s Powell Library.
With my eye on the highest
window I watch myself happy
sitting in a chair in the film room
watching The Marriage of Maria Braun
and I become a heroine too,
building a life of resilience in the rubble
and reconstruction. I am on a train going
somewhere, dazzling former soldiers
while dancing in a thin slip dress
and pink lipstick. I see myself
young and cunning because the war
is over and I can go wherever I want.
I walk away before the end
of the movie. Whether or not
you stay, the past keeps running up
against the present.

Natalie Marino is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and End of Revels (Bottlecap Press, 2025). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.

by Natalie Marino

A mess
of vagueness,

you are also
anything

you want to be,
a changeling.

You are a fortune
of fish,

a dying king,
an escaped

dove’s wing.
You hold

the moon
in your pocket

and camouflage
shy stars.

You are a young girl
with roses

murmuring
to the sky.

You grow
into a nimbus

and foreshadow
angry water,

making the rivers
quiver.

Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Atlas and Alice, Gigantic Sequins, Isele Magazine, Plainsongs, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Shore, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Under Memories of Stars, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (June 2023). Her Twitter handle is @NatalieGMarino and she is on Instagram @natalie_marino. She lives in California.