Marie Scarles | Two Truths and a Lie | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Marie Scarles is a writer, artist, and organizer from the marshlands of Mystic, CT, based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work appears in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Rutgers University.

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Also by Marie Scarles: Mother/Nature Nature, Again Doomstead Days at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery

March 19, 2025

Marie Scarles

Two Truths and a Lie

Of the stars, I love Scorpio most: eighth sign in the sky, a loyal killer. I will never be as bold as I was back then, straddling a stranger’s motorcycle under a broad September sky. I drank wine from a woman's mouth, touched her in the shower. On the roof of a bartender’s house, I prayed for night to take me. Instead, the bartender lent me his sweater. I never took it off. Twenty-three, I was already shattered. In the mid-July heat, I’d bike the whole city between midnight and three. He’ll never know what he missed. I thought every day about dying, but didn’t.

Two Truths and a Lie is a game you play when you’re trying to get to know a group of unfamiliar people in a slant way — not the usual “where are you from, what do you do,” but what’s hidden under surface appearances: two facts and one fiction. It asks you to look closely at your assumptions about others and yourself. I wrote this poem a decade after the events within it took place as a way to meet anew the young woman I once was, both live-wire alive and utterly numb. These states required one another. Living it, it would occasionally occur to me that maybe someday I would see this period as a story rather than an excruciating reality. I didn’t fully believe it. But here is the poem, more than ten years later. Self-discovery, the body’s limits, the heart’s grief, desire — I wrote the poem to reacquaint myself with those edges.