Poetry By Stephanie K. Merrill

      Thomas Wensing CC




The Great White Heron

stands to the nth power        begging me 
to pay tribute to the duendes dancing
her feet wet with the baptism of shallow water
sparkling in the arroyo         offering her holy white to the world
me wanting to rest in the eloquent silence of the morning
blessing the largeness of this present tense so staggering.

I remember packing my baggage to get to my mother
in time for her dying        the suitcase so heavy
I knew I would have to rely on the kindness of strangers
to help lift it into the overhead bins of the airplane.

I missed you 

and isn’t it something how        Mother       you are still
right here       and       I am still 
right here       both of us now gathering at these wetlands
and even though you had given up trying to find me
and even though I celebrated your great egret of flight
I will always regret my lateness.





Mourning Comes

Loneliness is breakfast 
in a dead love’s house
on the morning of their burial.
Even making the coffee 
is a solemn ceremony, a preparation
for the silent days to come.

Before you died 
I always loved a good funeral 
filled with the gravitas & 
the remembrances of a life fully lived--
so unlike a wedding with its fluff 
lacking all the tendrils of the dark.

After you shot yourself I slept for a year.
Last night the coyotes woke me 
screaming in the distance & 
by morning I knew
that one of the deer living 
in our greenbelt was dead.

Today I stand 
on the patio shrouded 
in the live 
oaks of summer &
I see your old blue Buick 
rising in the Eastern sky.
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Stephanie K. Merrill (she / her) has poems published in The Rise Up Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, UCity Review, Moist Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, Dear Poetry Journal, One Art, Sage Cigarettes, and elsewhere. Stephanie K. Merrill is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Austin, Texas. 
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