Mostly I’m erased, a sustained stranger:
the same frantic insomniac, the girl who heard
the herons humming in our dirty laundry
in the salt-moon’s need. Mostly my lungs fill with ships,
the start of the cycle of requirement:
(you’re good, love, but not that good):
I’m the honey-trap sent into the fog fields
where badgers crawl in and out
of my virtue, my grave,
the myth of my ceaseless tongue.
Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of four chapbooks: Star-Blind in the Family of Fortune Keepers (forthcoming, Hermeneutic Chaos Press), My Own Strange Beast (forthcoming, Porkbelly Press), After the Miracle Season (forthcoming, ELJ Editions), and Storm Was Her Voice (dancing girl press). Her work is also forthcoming in Zone 3, About Place Journal, The Fem, and others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University, where she won the Russell Macdonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry.
–Art by Ashley Holloway