Poetry by Rachel Lauren Myers

​Dr. Matthias Ripp CC



Force, Ruinous


you say    there is poison in you

but not like me
child
not like me

you say I am
enthralling
you fixate
on all the wrong cues

I am
a crashing force
the ocean    ruinous
raw power
output and calamity
     hurricane to storm wall
wet chaos     unrelentless

in you I find
gentle eddies, creeks,
trickled water over
smooth rocks
hushed tides on sparser shores
a lake, a pond
so solemn and still

I want destruction.
I cut my teeth on it, on
forces beyond your reach

and damn your tender fingers
your eyes filled like china bowls 
with clarity for all who can see

I’ll wear you down faster
than you can grow
only the strong survive
the hard salt-spray
the jagged rock
of my lonely     fortressed     shores
only the brave
endure
the isolation
the sapping of vitality 
            through interlocked fingers
sieve of souls, of sorts
for me





This Is Not My Home


this is not my home

yellow curtains yawning woe     
listless hours march past as ants

kids square up like their fathers in domino rows
bruised lips to match their mothers
in the ravine we squat    only place to be alone
in the piss-wet smell of sagebrush    and dust

this is not your home   
it was a farm of little orphan boys
put your bodies to work      
let you out of school 
knock the hard knocks right out of you so
a set of steady hands would do  

if not a father
if not a mother     
perhaps a callous or two
maybe a trade skill will do 
maybe a woman like me to touch you 

the kids our kids     
we screw them up
square up    
like our fathers     
our mothers     

the ravine or the farm     all the orphans your brothers





Bastard Days

I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head
there’s only a shadow of me, in a manner of speaking I’m dead
                                                                                     Sufjan Stevens, “John My Beloved”

I.

passacaglia     repeat
such songs inside of me
you see I wanted to       tell you 

dead to right one of those
bastard days            fugue of rage

not self-pity      no      
it’s just that I’m not sold
I    can’t see      can’t see 
I can’t see it-       

              the point, considering the toll


II.

repeat, repeat
father in hosp--may die---so sorry baby
    bastard day     fugue of rage

his uncle hunched, helpless
              O Danny as 
                            death’s entourage
                                          glides so mechanical
                                                        Daniel, Daniel, Daniel

i sink knees to cool linoleum
     pop fistful bitter white calm
               unblinking         chew mouth coated chemical

my bastard days   bent to worry
               to mourn early     often     fugue of rage

you should call they said
              you have to come, i tell my brother dully
                             you have to come    
                          

        
III.

            no one warned me when this happened I’d play the part of carnival barker,
                           calling my father’s death


IV.

the nurse tells me his liver is huge     the nurse tells me she’s not meant to save the lives of his
kind   they wind up right back here    the nurse tells me his ammonia levels were so high so high
the liver no longer filtered just sat fat and sick        she tells me my father has no DNR           she
tells me it’s my choice          she tells me if he wakes               to tell him to get a DNR   

                 i said i’d let him know
                 if he ever      i’d let him know
                           as in fuck you back        fuck you right back


V.

repeat repeat repeat
those songs inside of me         
he responds        fluttering eyelids
when I sing
                   
              my breath beautiful chemical             I am here dad  I trill        
              his nurse stops to listen      the ICU still

              I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head




VI.

    
daddy              I’m so tired of all of this           this dread



VII.


and you could die from this          I said
              to my hazy reflection eyes red            

maybe I know and yet
my father
that bastard        unkillable

               maybe, I know, and yet-
                     sometimes I wish I were not
                              so         durable

​
​

Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet and writer from Reno, Nevada. Her poems and prose appears or is forthcoming in The Moving Force Journal, Wild Roof Journal, and Drunk Monkeys. She recently showcased her poems as visual pieces for the collaborative show “Pictures and Poems” with Dale Slingland at The Depot Gallery in Sparks, Nevada. Rachel participated in the 2020 Community of Writers Poetry Program and is currently working on a chapbook. 

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