Poetry by Michaela Mayer

      Shawn Kent CC




In the Veins

should I write them        
out of the privacy of death
my great-grandmother         
plump and fabulous at seventy
whose face I have never seen 

who stitched racism
into her children’s clothes
with seamstress hands

my great-grandfather
whose alcohol-soaked liver 
never gave out
because he took a shotgun to his head
before fifty

the little clapboard house
where it happened
honey-smooth holes in the memory

how she was a teacher
before she married, how his brother
the bootlegger introduced the bottle
which eased him out of existence:
clean the wounds with bourbon

prejudice and open secrets
in the clotting edges
fester under southern swelter

my grandfather, living,
who hauled ice to pay for college
singing scotch and soda 
mud in your eye
stocky frame pulling himself free of the weeds

strangling up the porch
into the room, air humid,
a tradition of deliberate omission

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American Ophelia

Oh, listen to my story, I’ll tell you no lies/
How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise
—Doc Watson, Traditional

the tingling lilt of strings plucked to my name
& his, my false love, a stamp like a boot pressed
into the stories of other women. ink, repeat,
blue-black bruises across our bodies
which dissolve like paper in the river water.

called insane to negate the waxing
of our bellies, we move broken through weeds
on the bank: spiderwort, false indigo, obedient
plant, sedge; an incantation quiet
as the murmur of the current which swept away

the evidence. us. & myself, unremembered
if not for the music, the oral histories. a town
in disarray over the killing of an orphan raised
by respectable people. I mean rich. to ruin
a reputation by the mere fact of my physicality:

I cannot guess if he alone was guilty,
or if I inherited twice; first, my birth;
second, my parents’ wrath. guitar strings to soothe
the ouroboros of their minds, the moneyed
ones: advantageous marriages, investments,

the murder of a nineteen-year-old girl. or am I
paranoid? it is all undocumented.
listen: here comes one now, singing my memory,
words which evanesce like bank mist
in the Carolina air. this is all that is left:

my hair waterlogged as my dress, a gravestone,
a plank in a song which betrays the chasm 
between haves and have-nots. remember me as half 
of each, my body the grounds of a duel.
the survivors paid their way.

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Semaphore

the fragile zenith of autumn sun.
the moment crystalizing, like a kidney stone,
between us. mama, he hurt me--
my voice like an echo at the end of your tunnel.





Michaela Mayer (she/her) has followed a trajectory southward from Maryland, to Virginia, to North Carolina, not counting travels. On one side, her family history is Southern Gothic; on the other, her forebears are Lovecraftian in their northern secrecy, peculiarity, and professional chilliness. She writes poetry, the occasional essay, and can be found on Instagram @mswannmayer55. Her works have been previously published in multiple online journals, and she has a PDF chapbook out with Fahmidan.
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