Merrill Oliver Douglas

Day’s End

How tranquil the light
    that spills from the moon-
shaped globe my husband hung
    on the kitchen ceiling.

Once I thought radiance
    flowed from the sky. But
look: it hums in my fingers,
    ringless, bitten, working a sponge.

What if happiness is no more
    than the tune that spins in my head
while I scrub at a dried slash
    of sauce on the spoon rest?


Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full length collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, SWWIM Every Day, South Florida Poetry Journal, Verse Daily and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.