Poetry by Karla Linn Merrifield

                Sjoerd Los CC



Your Eyes Were Once Full of Language


The sadness comes in waves
like first-trimester nausea.
We are pregnant with death.

I am carrying your elegy 
in my lyrical heart-womb.
Blood floods its metaphors.

In slowing pulses, the poem 
shows love’s final complications:
birthing prematurely your last word.

                                après Anne Sexton

​


After the Storm


Widow Woman wonders
why the phoebe whistles

about rainshine on leaves
the billion drops dripping

into an open mouth
of solitude and sighs.

I wander the woodlands 
leaving tears for the birds.

​

Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 700+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the newly released full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her Godwit:  Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye.