The next day after the war is over, skeletons of swallows will return. They won’t have beaks, and their white, hard-boiled eyes will fly three inches ahead of their semi-transparent faces – or sometimes on their side. Skeletons of babies will start whimpering in the cradles, and the skeleton of a doggy will dig itself out of the ashes. It will try to find its collar, but it will fail and disintegrate melancholically into mush and bones. The skeleton of a man in a gas-mask will come out onto the porch, and will be looking for a long time at the skeletons of chickens digging the radioactive ashes and listening to the pensive caving of crows’ skeletons on the fritted skeletons of lampposts. When he hears a soft remote honking, he will look up at the sky, startled.…
my mother, pearl, with folded hands, in rooms patiently waiting. her hands are a shimmering flame. time is precious in the inspiration. her wriggling in the doctor’s ear. a blanket for a shawl, taking three buses to the hospital in a blizzard to come get me. how is he getting better, when he believes the wall is a piano? at least he plays a real one at home. like the earnest search for the b section of a maple tree. not a figure yet, but the contours of one. he’s even composed pieces on and for the wall he calls “études for chalk piano and penumbral figures on the wall.” quite stunning really. the insistence that we be somebody somewhere impedes assembly. i’m in the middle of the piece with melody all around.…
Twelve days postpartum, lactating heavily, and under suicide watch on the fifth floor of Lutheran General Hospital—the psych ward—the staff compelled me to do things other than eat, sleep, and pump milk1 for my newborn child2. They forced me to strip, for example, when I first got there, to check my body for wounds and scars. People cut, they told me. I don’t, I told them. My only visible scar was a two-year-old surgical scar from a bowel resection for an intestinal blockage that almost killed me—silent confirmation that I’d survived worse pain than this. Besides that, not so much as a Hello, Kitty tattoo. They also required I attend mental-health-themed “training” sessions. Group therapy. With Depressive But Kind Radiologist, Inappropriate Hugs Girl, and Man Who Thinks He’s Al Pacino From Scent of A Woman and Says “Ooo-HA!”…
I stretch another strip of packing tape over the three holes and punch new ones through it. I fold what I think is a cricket in the bedspread while Lili cries out
for a Kleenex, then rummages through the bedding bunched in her lap for a black wolf spider. Which becomes just one of the reasons I lie awake counting
breaths and commanding my body not to stir, my ankles not to cross, my nose not to itch. In the coverless scrapbook of motorized vehicles I keep with my boy,
we flip though torn service cards, disembodied jeep doors, a Hummer with Christmas tree roof-strapped and polar bear in the passenger seat. When I feel her weight lift
and bedsprings release, late night I cannot sleep, I find the light on in the study: my Montessori teacher wife on her phone, ordering more books on the Scholastic website. …
“Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though.” -Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron
Molly Stevens was feeling pretty good. No, Molly Stevens was feeling pretty great. It’s true she had been nervous this morning, everyone was nervous the morning of their annual, but things could not have gone any better. Molly swung her feet against the exam room table.
Molly’s interviewer this morning, Shelia, had been
impressed with Molly’s dietary journal, as well she should be- a three day
cleanse every four weeks and nothing less healthy than a handful of walnuts and
unsweetened craisins as an indulgent afternoon snack. Shelia had even
complimented her on her lipstick choice. Becoming.
That was the exact word she had used to describe her make-up. A very good sign.…
Carole Mertz is an author, poet, and editor who’s had works published in literary journals in America, Canada, Great Britain, and Africa. An Oberlin College graduate, she’s Book Review Editor for Dreamers Creative Writing; reader of prose and poetry for Mom Egg Review; member of the Prize Nomination Committee for Ekphrastic Review; and an advance reader for the WNBA 2018 Poetry Contest. Kendra Boileau of Penn State University Press notes: “Mertz is a master of poetic form, imagery, sonority, and wit.”
Your poems show a knowing of the darkness but also of the sunrises while “…searching for a distant view of everything.” The poems encompass childhood, courtship, marriage, maturity, and the reader is advised to “hang on to your memories.” How did you decide the chapbook’s title?…
Her
fingers move up and down the neck with the nonchalance and silky smooth rhythm
of an old master. They don’t even seem
to be touching the strings and frets.
The gentle yet commanded rise and fall of her right wrist, as sure and
steady as a metronome, brings to mind the repetitive yet precise swinging of a
pendulum, back and forth, back and forth, each stroke as methodically beautiful
as the next, the lost momentum subsumed by subtlety. It’s like her entire body’s an extension of
the guitar, and the rhythm seems to be rising from her feet like the duende of
the flamenco maestros Lorca knew so well, slowly, steadily swelling up and
swathing the rest of her person, guitar included, ‘til it rushes over like a
wall of water, cascading onto the crowd and drowning their inhibitions, replenishing
minds and bodies of those fortunate enough to bear witness. …
