Megan Merchant

Self-Portrait as a Burned-Out Porch Light

A tree crammed with bluebirds, snow. A forklift slips from a hill. The neighbour shoots his rifle to avalanche. A taste of rust. It’s all a love poem. Even the owl’s grief—how it spoons the dark. The open mouth of cold. I wanted it to be wistful. Forgive me, I am not telling this well. I forgot where to place the beginning—how I broke on the back porch, never told a soul. His eyes—smoked herring and blue. I plugged them into a different life. Then, morning. Garbage men collecting bins of dead birds, fish scales like glitter. Wax paper. String. An orchestra of leaving. I could never make sense of the way the trees glow, are backlit by kitchen windows, the silhouettes of wives in the dulled-quiet, scraping, rinsing, where they end and I 

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From Hortensia, in winter (New Amercian Press, 2024). First published in Barzakh Magazine, Spring 2021.
 
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Psithuris
 
It is said that Orpheus could silence the wind. This is a praise of abstraction. I am looking for a word that means the sound wind makes through the trees before it reaches my body. I stand in the night-yard wanting to be included in a definition, rattling language for what moves against my skin, the small constellation of scars along my arms. The Greeks call it psithuris, but even that falls short. Someone hung an oil painting in the bank lobby, gold-encrusted, large-scale, Hades depicted with a bird-tipped sceptre. A nightjar without star clusters to guide it. Stuck. It is said that Eurydice wasn’t angry because she felt loved. But wind is a distortion of sound. The further away, the slower it arrives. I can hear her, the way grief isn’t squalor or complacency, but cleaves into a body, leaves a woman wingless. Her hair shedding into nests that birds will never warm. 
 
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They Promised That You Were Set Apart for Something Holy

Did you dream about oceans while you were mud-stuck in the Mississippi, something you couldn’t see the banks of, like faith? Salt, birdwing, a weekday sneak of sour wine. You were all scripture and scrub oak, miracles that profited man. On Sundays, I open the dictionary, look for words you might have hummed, words that will peel the generations between us. Are your eyes hazel, do they shift in the onslaught of spring? The blue of needing another body to remind you of your own? Did you feel desire but give it your husband’s name? 

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From Hortensia, in winter ( New American Press, 2024) and first published in Birdcoat Quarterly, Spring 2023.) 
 
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Helpmeet: 

to make man “comfortable...to dress his food...be pleasing to his sight, and...be in all respects...entirely answerable to his...wants and wishes.” john gill, 18-century biblical scholar 

There are days I feel porous. Drool paint through a tea strainer onto linen. Others, I walk the dog, plunge stones in the creek with insults. To be all things at once while still being yourself—isn’t that the goal? Hortensia, were you given the smallest room in the house of your own life? I am gifted a single window. Winter crammed in the way that only a cat could skuttle through. You are my periscope, the law of reflection at play, these poems—the surface. Teach me how to dismantle desire. The roots of it. De sidere, meaning from the stars. I hear deciduous--the dropping of a part that is no longer needed or useful. Chokecherry, lilac, maple. At the first bend of cold, I imagine the small flush of your garden plot in bloom, how such tedious keeping was meant to bring delight, only to wake each morning and find it flooded with flightless birds. 

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From Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024).
 
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Sealing
 
(for Hortensia Patrick Merchant, March 1824-April 1905)
 
silk sutures link us like marionettes / drips that freeze over bark before descending / you can’t hear the water’s urge unless it’s rushing / you are my flood subject now / I scrub a blue bowl in a chipped basin / drip my hair with lavender / dream about sterile rooms / a salpingectomy / slender trunk / how did you carry, was it low / a diviner whispered my daughter’s names into my palms / a pit from a sweet rotted fruit appeared under the juniper / I would like to have one of your early apples, you wrote / was that prayer / on the coldest days mountain lions grit their teeth outside my window / their chatter sounds like church bells / after a hard freeze , did you stand on the Mississippi and not think of drowning / your nightgown floating white and clean as wind / did you listen
 
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From Hortensia, in winter ( New American Press, 2024) and first published in Birdcoat Quarterly, Spring 2023.) 
 
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Divining Rod

A hairline fracture. A lyre snake bedded in my underwear drawer. Curdled dream. Blade snapped from the handle. Hortensia, teach me how to read the signs—before dawn, I stumbled onto antlers shed well before March. They grew behind its body, closest to god. I know things and not—that honeycomb sealed in a jar can last a year, at best. That the river can run itself backwards. It takes a natural disaster. What would you do? Did you know that the stillest waters can secret whirlpools? The downdraft happens when bodies collide. A maelstrom. The way he cupped my chin—asked me to look— was not at, but through. As if there was a way out. 

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From Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024). 
 
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Exodus

Milk froths over, feathery in a glazed mug. I watch a woodpecker forget the geography of air—churn in the invisible. Then flee. I feel silence to mean what’s missing, never shapeless. Some days love. Another round of snow arriving, another mistake I’ll settle into as understanding more about what I’ve become. I am looking for the word that falls between almost and touch. That consideration. It has its own airspace. The gap where the juniper was chopped is a frame now. If only the light would enter, I could trick myself into believing it was heat. 

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From Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024). First published in CALYX, Summer/ Fall 2023.

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Subjects to Consider for Both Painting and Writing

Film on my teeth after eating a hard-boiled egg. Why anyone would call blood crimson. Chopping wood on a day you can see your breath. The clicking sound that Mahjong tiles make. The speed at which they are placed. A windchime strung with bones. The way winter light feels most earnest in the morning. His chin, as it pressed against my shoulder blade. The muscles of grief that cramp without warning. Why men are allowed to age—the absence of a societal tantrum. The Farmer’s Almanac that everyone in town is mumbling about. Radishes in a white bowl. Glue, hardened, on the window that looks like frost. Scratches on old records that are a kind of music. Gray hairs in the sink. How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held. 

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From Hortensia, in winter (New Amercian Press, 2024). First published in Psaltry & Lyre, December 2022.
 
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Consent Form 
 
I spend days not sleeping in a sterile room contemplating the internal organs a surgeon has removed joking I'm shocked it wasn't some motel bathtub after a heavy night of whiskey & heat for black market organs. My skin zipped with fishing line and infection. Those were the horror stories of my teenage years. Waking with parts of me removed without consent. But now, it’s the uterus & tubes, one ovary, my cervix—organs that made me ripest. I'm in awe that I don’t feel shriveled the way society has pinned my age bracket and gender, and that there is any conversation that begins with I'm supposed to feel. I've signed more than a handful of consent forms, given permission each time a pill is presented, erased blame for human error. I'm navigating the loose ends of a twenty-year marriage where I did not do the same. In therapy, I've learned to accept an absence of control by repeating I do not love this. This way, it is not a loss. Instead, a silhouette. Right now, I do not love the bleeping cycle of sharps & IV drips. The abdominal binder. The internal stitches I'm afraid of tearing. The riddled pain that pills solve. But catch the way the flowers a man I can’t stop thinking about has sent to my room, how they greedily reopen when a nurse is kind enough to move the vase closest to the window, to recover what light has squared through.
 
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I have not yet met all of the people who will love me
 
I carve out tenderness with a hairpin made of bone. Little red fox in my brain-fog. I’d hack the weed sprouts below my knees to find you. Amongst ant hills and rabbit fur. Floozy sunflowers that line the ditch. I’ve turned stone after stone in my palm imagining the dip of your back. I’m growing weary of waiting whistling a banjo tune in the eye of the storm. As offering, I’ve left mason jars with two fingers of whiskey for you on the front porch. All wasp-flick and stink beetles. I imagine you as dusk, pressing your mouth to my shin. Saying, salt. Saying, aftermath. An equation I’m inventing just to solve you in. I am writing to you as cracks in the window. The mourning doves try to pierce their beaks through. A litany of cicada sheds piled underneath. Bodies unzipped. I’m waiting, needful as spoons that heavy in the drawer. Wanting to be taken out, to be glint and useful. To press cold against the small cut on your lip.
 
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First published in Rhino 2024. 
 
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Megan Merchant (she/her) is author of six full-length poetry collections, a children’s book with Penguin Random House, and a handful of chapbooks. She is a board member for the Northern Arizona Book Festival, the owner of the editing, mentoring, and manuscript consultation business www.shiversong.com and holds an M.F.A. degree from UNLV. She is a visual artist and, most recently, won the New American Poetry Prize for her collection Hortensia, in winter. You can find her work at  https://meganmerchant.wixsite.com/poet