post mortem
won’t be long now
they say
spooning you another
taste of mercy
there is an orchid
in the corner
kneeling in its
old dry dirt
time makes itself
scarce, hiding
upstairs like a child
at a grown-up party
what is death
but the strangest
grown-up
party?
a record spins
unheard
but some of you breathe
and it is booming
when the hour
comes, they have you
leave the room,
shut the door
you don’t need to see this
they say, shoveling
the mercy
down your throat
what is death
but a thing
you can’t
stop seeing?
they blow out
the candles
they leave you
alone
Lost
And the bat tonguing its way in the dark
forgets what the night should taste like
And the limousine drivers and widows
make a job out of being lost
And you lose me in the laundry
And you lose me like a game
And you sometimes forget you can stand
on the side of the road
And breathe the dust of the running motors
laying itself on the dirt field there
And hold the low-flying planes in your
close pink palm
And another cop running circles around the median
forgets what he is looking for
And you lose me in plain sight
And you fill my shoes with water, paint me mud
And there is something far away
in being present with no purpose
And there is something
strangely close about the sky
saturday, as defined
tonight I heard a perfect cover
of have you ever seen the rain
underground
all alone on a yellow pole
a new hole in my head
the same love in my diaphragm
rasping
like the short, bald singer
it was a perfect day
everyone smiled
nobody was worried
once
we marveled at black squirrels
miles, like fields to a cow
stretched with no certainty
but danced, the heat a new
face
calling and reeking and flat
what a great, impossible novelty
not the happy people,
people, that there were people at all
witnesses
to this immovable summer
coming out of the subway
into the night that was once so lonely
I remember that we are all
fragile
as candy-covered fruit
Meredith Cottle is a poet from New York with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University and an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University. Her work has been published in Ragazine, Shrew Lit Mag, Sheepshead Review, Streetlight Press, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Rising Phoenix Review.