Poetry by Nancy L Meyer

      Dillan K CC




The Great Below
After Japan, Eve Jones
 
My aunt died in the bathtub. No one would say
if the water was cold. 
 
She says she has no use
for hospice, knows all the stories. 
Says her daughters need a life. 
 
We all have a Motherhood 
that kills itself. 
 
When my aunt trundles her cart 
from Gristedes I say, Enough already. Hire help.  
A stingy heart can kill a mother.
 
We’re all wetlands and wallow. We are all
stories. I bury mine. 
 
Inanna, Queen of Heaven, braved 
the Great Below to console her Sister. 
Rival or not—one deathly glance,
Inanna’s corpse hung on a hook 
for 3 days. 
 
Everyone’s faith has trapdoors. My aunt’s
an atheist who believes in facts. 
Did her nose—her long, rosy nose—sink 
under the water? 
 
I’m a daughter who’s a faker. 
Was there even a tub?
My water’s cold and I don’t 
know how to warm it.
 
Her daughters hover. My aunt says
she wants to chant like a cantor, gather 
her tribe in the parlor, feed us all 
chopped liver. Have you ever 
smothered someone? 
 
I beg my aunt not to die in the tub.
We ate chopped liver in the parlor. 
Didn’t sing. I have a faith that 
lives in an aunt.
 
 
*from The Descent of Inanna, Tr. Diane Wolkstein, Noah Kramer, 1983

​





A Mother’s Eye
              Inspired by Carl Phillips, Undo It

  
Skimming the crest of memory, grey tone that itself
fixes on the one day, I forget that Ellington means
everything—no matter
 
               the endless replay—that
independence was always essential, always a joy, 
never a breeze under the door but instead
what you alone, by choice, built brick by
brick, always solid
 
               and always knocked aside…as for
that cha-cha-cha, the battle has, so often,
hung between us—one mis-step, a crown fire, a buffalo stampede
pounding the brown prairie between us into dust--
 
I will never hear the tune afresh: I’ll remember anyway—always
its shadow. You are still to me a splurging yeast, but what
was I to you?




​She/her, intrepid cyclist, grandmother of 5 young adults. After many anthologies and journals, first book, The Stoop and The Steeple, published in September 2024 by Frog on the Moon is keeping me busy reaching a wide audience beyond poetry.