Megan Merchant
Self-portrait as a burnt-out porch light
A tree crammed with bluebirds, snow. A forklift
slips from a hill. The neighbor shoots his rifle to avalanche.
A taste of rust. It’s all a love poem. Even the owl’s grief—
how it spoons the dark. The open mouth of cold. I wanted
it to be wistful. Forgive me, I am not telling this well.
I forgot where to place the beginning—how I broke on the
back porch, never told a soul. His eyes—smoked herring
and blue. I plugged them into a different life. Then,
morning. Garbage men collecting bins of dead birds, fish
scales like glitter. Wax paper. String. An orchestra of leaving.
I could never make sense of the way the trees glow, are
backlit by kitchen windows, the silhouettes of wives
in the dulled-quiet, scraping, rinsing, where they end and I.
A woman’s body is meant to disappear
The woodpecker plays
dead notes on the juniper.
I mimic by resting my ring
finger on the string.
What I want does not echo,
it thuds.
*
When I nick my leg shaving,
I trace a stick family
on the shower door
in blood,
then fog the glass
with my breath,
as if adding another,
to see how much
more of me
would blur.
Megan Merchant lives in the tall pines of Prescott, AZ with her husband and two children. She holds an M.F.A. degree in International Creative Writing from UNLV and is the author of three full-length poetry collections with Glass Lyre Press: Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2015), Grief Flowers (2018). She is a Lyrebird Award winner (2017) and has published four chapbooks and a children’s book, These Words I Shaped for You (Philomel Books). Her latest book, Before the Fevered Snow, was released in April 2020 with Stillhouse Press. She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, second place in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and most recently the Inaugural Michelle Boisseau Prize. She is an Editor at Pirene’s Fountain and The Comstock Review. You can find her work at meganmerchant.wix.com/poet.