Persephone as a Moat The first touch was a whispered voice hissing     stay back. On my back he took me. Me: a soft spell, an under garment, a shallow end. Endings and beginnings, endings and beginning— a quiet chant, hidden beneath breath. Breathe slowly through the night, again. Again, reverse course– pretend to smile, stay alive. Alive but not    alive (always    hiding). Hiding from a man is not the same as hiding from a God. God who made me now unmake me. Me: a moat, hair falling in a circle around my feet. Meriwether Clarke’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, The Boiler, Seneca Review,…

Sioux Falls I have to take what the machine tells me on faith, that this is in fact a large city in South Dakota and that they have restaurants there I recognize, and the people believe more or less what I do having been born at more or less at the same time, but the children of Sioux Falls know better, and in their fantastical games of make believe that requires no machine, only the vastness and whimsy of minds still delighted by their own self invention, pretend I am here, in the backyard of the Maryland house where old friends live who have never left, with their family of…

Loose Change I see you on this train.I can recite your spiel by heart.You said the same thing yesterday.Last week, last month, last year.You said it four summers ago whenI first boarded this Q Train.     “My name is Lamont.     I just lost my mom.” You’re preparing your soliloquy.I mouth your words like a cinephileReciting a film they’ve seen 100 times.(Me? Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)     My name is Lamont.     I just lost my mom.”You’re digging in the wrong place.Your ballcap sags empty. I promise I don’t think you’re malingering.But tell: How far back can just go?Is it true? Grief can be that dense?A black hole distorting light, time,Destroying any distinction betweenFour months or…

Woodcutters from Fiery Ships At the diner, elders discussed them in various tones. Some whispered, as if there’d been a scandal. Others spoke bluntly to stanch the listener’s desire to dismiss the tales. The young debunked the legends, claimed they’d dispatched a woodcutter with a punt to the rump. In a pub the clientele went silent when I asked. I was told they were closing, yet the establishment was full. Later, we sat on the verandah, sipping saké, formulating half-serious haiku about the wind and the dark spruces. We gazed to the distance. Then we saw the glow. I thought the moon would be birthed from the horizon, but a…

Grief Pastoral The morning after your departure, I found a keythe size of my middle nail, that I hung at my neck,a copper ring that I slipped on my smallest finger,a half-shell, white, that I placed in my pocket. Wearing this armor from the dirt, I aimedto go forward strong, swinging from the hipas I plow through. But this road keeps twisting.After each blind corner is a new bale of grief. Fresh cut, they’re not placed the way I love,precisely, in a shorn field, nor stacked high in the pole barnto climb once and feel victorious. These are askewand heavy, bounced from a truck’s back, a hundred pounds apiece held…

They Hear Him All of my relatives say they hear him:he is the knocking of the robin’s wingjust so against the window, the springtimebuzz of the electric saw, the riseof children’s laughter from the roundabout.Wonderful, I say, but I’m sour.He’s my father. He would not be wingor saw or child. He would not consentto changing his form thus. I am certain:he’s quiet. I never hear his low baritonechords. Not the rumble of a throat fullof sleep. Not the soft upward lilt whenhe says Jeanine. He’s gone. Or an awfultruth: he talks. He does not talk to me. Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me…

Moon Poem after Phoebe Bridgers “Moon Song” I am not a dog with a bird at your door. Really, I am the yellow bird in the mouth of a dog. I am the color of marigolds in August, and I am still alive, but I hold my breath. My feathers are almost as light as my bones, which are full of the same air as the sky. I can smell the dog breathing, his rotting back teeth pressing against my skin, not too deep yet. I am holding still, I am playing dead, I am thinking of eggs. My eggs back in the nest: freckled, the palest blue. I spent…

West 10th St, River of Evening: Chez Sardine  Blue chill in the air, lungs leaping, all the gleam of fresh nightfall funnelled into narrow streets. The illusion of homing in on it.  Have I dined here before? I confess I haven’t. I fiddle with chopsticks, air caught in my throat.  Dinner for one (wife out of town), the waiter’s nod and smile, an oversized match to a votive candle.  I can’t resist the maple-miso salmon head, chef’s special, left in the oven for hours, a mass of knotted connective  tissue slowly melted. Faced with the out-thrust jaw, I peel the skin’s thick char, a crunch of sugar and funk,  and scoop the cheek-flesh. I resort to hands, tug at underpinnings, loosen pockets of collagen.  A pile of thin…

Ithaka It took[1] seventeen-plus yearsto accept your invitation[2] I shouldn’t have been[3]surprised to learn that the train doesn’t stop there anymore[4]but, remarkably, an ancient white cat stared at me as Ipassed[5] and I thought of who I used to be and whatwe leave behind to become what we are no longer[6]and something in my solar plexus makes me —is that the inchoate heart?[7]—stand up and run [1]  and took and took from me [2]  the blue door opens onto light [3]  is what I thought the world was whispering [4]  where once were shops and gardens—remember the dandelion wine?the witch who gasped when you drewthe ten of swords? penitentiary-like tenements…

Dear April Dear rain like background music in a bad restaurantand dear flood of buds on the trees. Dear life in which I imaginemy belly as proof of the goodwill of the fates,dear the cost of embracing another side dish of a season,of meandering and waiting at each swollen stream—the debris carried so rapidly, the breathless mudbunched with ice at the side of the road.  I join the crowds outside the movies—movies where a singing and dancing coupleproclaim their true love, even when. Dear you of constant sorrow, clipping branches,stirring the clear water in a vase—dear grieving that is never quiet,dear you falling and studyingthe architecture of lost ground.If you face…