Narc & two others
new poems by Lilly Merrill
Narc
Riding one equinox to the next,
innumerable grackles send up a great
wheezing-through-the-organ-pipes racket,
and he shouts across the street, over
the swamp and two radios
that they won’t let him have Listerine anymore.
Pretending to be one to whom anything
is addressed, I iron myself into
cedars that might join over the drive
in arching neglect, to roof
a freezing and mercifully
unfreezing pool
for daffodils to bow and be
driven over, tired under, while he echoes
the interminable barking
that might wake us into
something better.
Kellogg’s
Maybe that woman holding flowers outside is waiting
for her lover this Tuesday night, he has the nerve to say.
Absolutely, you would like Marty Robbins. I am just-so illegible
to myself, all I have is to toss a napkin, and limply at that. This is bad
like the last time I was in here, when Eli fell on his head, and we
found ourselves in the care of the unbelieving Dr. Sunshine.
Inelastic collision, and recall. I’m no longer curious about being told what to do.
I will cry and not eat this; yes, person, persons. And I should like to be one.
Servers do shrink at the well of tears. I am studying the backs of my hands on
a dusty rose four-top. I take a picture that will not be a burden to him.
When next we make ourselves beneficiaries of this something-abject,
loafer’s trip to hear this song run back: overfull with regret, exactly here.
I can see the device, always turned away when he breaks these things. I am absorbed
in my wilderness, he is hosting me in his. I cannot read or fold a map. I am mining
bad after the goodness that he chants over and over and over (I too am partial
to that wondering aloud). I mean for my lips to drive it down through his forehead.
There. Then, cute! does not survive the tone with which he pronounces it, lone long hair
plucked from a shirt. I am too softly disposed to stop his breathing
for any length of time. Would that I could extinguish the work lights, beaming all
night across the garden. I am as gentle as I’d like to stay, peril herein, shaving
his neck, before he meets his mother.
Bomber
With every turn through this dead construction,
nothing gives up its uncurling
out there in the
productive, endlessly
dilating world.
Beating parts arrive late
to repeople the rooms
I’m alive in, so still I
address myself to you.
Left hip, once purposeless
wears flesh that reanimates on
command, even now, as it was
grasped in greeting,
when you were carried away again
drinking me, as if you’d
never asked to drown.
Lilly Merrill is making her way back to NYC soon, but hanging out in the woods of New Hampshire for now. She is on X and everywhere else at @ironhandslil.
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