Read More: A brief Q&A with Jed Myers
I’ll Ring You
Here, a high silver ceiling hangs over the trees.
The day is a room, wainscoted stony and green,
and painted, in patches, the drab tones that’ve pleased
the owners of nearby homes. The room’s air is clean
compared with just months ago when forests went up
in immense migrations of char, those legions of ash
I coughed at wherever I went. Now I’m pent up
in my backyard parlor, knowing the world is awash
in a flood of invisible particles waiting for us
to inhale fresh swells of murderous aerosols.
So we’ve subdivided ourselves, as our landlords must
partition their floors into pricier lonelier stalls.
Oh, it’s alright, I’ll ring you, and later, we’ll Zoom.
And let’s meet tonight as ever, in our starlight room.
Stolen Beam
—for A
Before night blows the day off to the west,
The great ocean between the worlds revealed,
I drink some light, and hold it in my chest,
Throat closed against my outbreath. So I seal
The glow around my heart. I work it in
For when it’s dark, when lying down with you
Our long drift across the void begins.
It’s good we’ll have a lamp to see us through.
Why trust the sea of sleep? We could be rolled […]
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Frayed Sonnet to a Descendant
Let this fragment find you.
I won’t see
you kneel to lift
What’s this a strip of hide
or old cloth
from the tinsel of debris
left on the shore by your time’s
daily tide.
I won’t see the heads
or tails of your life’s
coin land in the mulch
or in the red mud
after all our fighting
tooth and knife
for what we’ll never win.
But you my blood
who read this shred, I must believe
you dance
on bricks baked of the slag
of our mistakes,
your young woods buzz
with lizards birds and ants,
our craters pooled with rain become
your lakes—
no, I won’t see
across the sea of dead,
but dream you thrive, by this
love’s hanging thread.
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Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels (Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award) and Love’s Test (winner, Grayson Books Chapbook Contest). Recognitions include Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Prime Number Magazine Award, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize, and The Tishman Review’s Millay Prize. Poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle and is Poetry Editor for Bracken.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Jed Myers