Poetry by Merridawn Duckler

Everything ends, but not everything begins

When the sun drops
it’s a rout, a slam,
outside the park, inside the lines,
no contested down, nightfall. But what brings day?
“If you keep looking, it’ll never come,”
my family liked to say, in unison, 
as charcoal lights lost their margins
to reveal the night-covered oak on the river, a visible fact.
The sky went gray unnoticed, like a loved one’s
beard. Moon backed away as
I tried to remember the chip name
that matches that color, but while my eyes
were shielded not only the oak tree
but the very leaves on the ground
grew clear in outline as cat paws.
And all at once—how did this happen?--
conceived before it was written:
astronomical, nautical, civil, bright,
it was day.
And the cocoon for new lovers
and those at the bedside of the dying,
fragile slice of the long passage,
had come and gone. Dawn.
Let us pray.




​imitatio dei
 
When I want a world, I want it yesterday;
at parties, I’m awkward but believe my absence is felt.
 
At work, out of nothing comes something                                                                                        
but I have no confirmation of this, only the great jade waters
 
slipping on the surface of the world like a marble,
only the sky, blue canvas over the world mix of all colors
 
or a jar of school paste under which blues seep,
and my eyes were two light switches when I was a kid,
 
lying in bed, making the trees roll off my fingertips,
painting with shadows where I’d hidden a charcoal briquette
 
under a large rock, since I’d read
this was how diamonds are made.
 

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Bio: Merridawn Duckler is a poet, playwright from Portland, Oregon. She’s the author of “Interstate” forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Recent work published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Juked, Jet Fuel Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, the anthologies “Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry” and “Weaving the Terrain” from Dos Gatos Press. Fellowships/awards include Writers@Work, NEA, Yaddo, Squaw Valley, SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, Southampton Poetry Conference, Wigleaf Top 50 in micro-fiction, Southampton Review flash contest. She’s an editor at Narrative and at the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics. 
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