Author Archives: marey mercy

Native Tongue – New Poem

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This is a new one. If I decide I don’t like it I’ll take it down, so read it quickly, ’cause I do that a LOT. And if you like it let me know – it motivates me to leave it up.

Native Tongue

The blood I can feel
each morning, slow as sap
through the skin & tissue.

Untapped. Maybe I need
medication, it’s probably hormones
someone will say.

It’s some-odd years
of the same. Not the ones
already lived, it’s what is

to come. I regret
what is left. No man ever learned

his lesson from me. My lips
were never red. My native tongue not
his first language. His blood

so blue it showed through
on his face & fingers.

Imprint – Poem

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Imprint

I didn’t want to touch the fawn I found
nestled next to her dead mother
on the dirtroad shoulder, went
for my cell phone instead to call
the local shelter. I knew enough
of human touch contaminating
nature, how just my voice could generate
enough stress to kill. While waiting
for the rescue truck to come I kept
my distance, recalling stories I’d heard
about encounters with the wild
that made people feel small and insignificant,
but I didn’t feel small, I felt enormous,
as if my fingers were the prongs of pitchforks,
my breath the tremor of jackhammers.
After the workers came and carried her
away, I wandered back to the yellow car
I’ve loved one-sidedly for years, and together
we tumbled home like a great wrecking ball
careening towards another unsuspecting destination.

Weekly prompt for We Write Poems

Waiting for Bolivar Ferry – Poem

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Waiting For Bolivar Ferry

We wait our turn
on a weekend
when tourists and teens
converge
on the peninsula
to stretch their skin
in the sun: engines off,
windows down,
radios up,
as if the beat
proclaims
some inner rhythm
of parched hearts.

A sheen of boys
begins to volley
for attention, girls
in open truckbeds
cake makeup,
spray hair
already starched
with heat.

The shoreline
brings the sleaze
out of everyone,
the steam
that shimmies up
from the concrete,
the stick, the sweat,
the hidden grit
that slicks
to the surface.

We are waiting
for Bolivar Ferry.

When it docks
we’ll all pull forward
in tight metal rows
onto the boat
that will slick us
like plastic
six-pack scrap
across the sea.

Asking the Water – Poem

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Asking the Water

I am sitting on the concrete steps that file down into rocks at the jetties and fade into sand. He does not know me, stands at my back, to my right, as I watch the ocean blind the sky with its own light, watch the skin of sea split open like wound, the white-edged lip of broken water lean towards land, then draw back. The shore

is incidental. Or maybe I am, or maybe it is he, standing behind me, saying: If there’s anything I can do, words that fade like something wet slipped into dryness. He knows how that sentence ends, everyone does, touches my shoulder instead, turns to walk back up salt-dusted stairs to the yellow car that brought us here, the car that will take us back,

and water whispers at my feet, tangling between rocks and shells, the tidal hush of secrets.