Barbara A Meier teaches kindergarten in Gold Beach, OR, where she continually frets over how to get five-year-olds to start a sentence with an uppercase letter, end with a period, and make sense. In her spare time, she looks for agates, petrified wood, and fossils on the beautiful Southern Oregon beaches. She has been published in The Poeming Pigeon, Cacti Fur, Highland Park Poetry, and Poetry Pacific.https://basicallybarbmeier.wordpress.com/
Alcohol Seas and Opiate Skies
Under the alcohol seas and opiate skies,
He fell asleep last night.
didn’t know I was checking
to see if he was breathing.
There’s a curl on his forehead he hates.
I brush it lightly to feel if his skin is warm.
He wakes with a gasp and mumbles something
in his sleep.
“Are you alive?”
He grunts yes, never remembering
he spoke.
If I could crawl down into his brain
I’d make him remember
and he’d care once more for me.
I’d whisper to him
“If you are lost out at sea,
I’d tell you to swim parallel to me.”
But you drift out to sea in a filmy haze,
never remembering the shore or the breeze
and the crabs dine on what’s left of you and me.
A Little Death in Methow Valley
The moon through the clothesline wire.
Framing the river sheen and dusky leaves.
The coarse soil beneath my thighs
embeds the pain just a little deeper.
I hold my arms to the wire,
grasping the moon between my hands.
Wrapping the Emperor’s clothes around my breasts,
the silk buttons, the lacy neckline, the wire.
I am alone in the cold diamond light.
My tears, pearls dripping down the sky,
catching strands of snot in my hair,
rocking to the sobs of the Cicadas.
I wear the night, velvet on my shoulders.
Squatting to urinate in vintage lilacs,
while you masturbate on rubber vinyl.
What’s left of us grows slack between backyard and basement.
I weave the moonlight to cover what falls to the ground,
mindlessly chanting,
“How can I stay?
But how do I go?”
We fooled ourselves with our fantasies of brocade
that were really only polyester lies, linen fabrications,
and fairytales of silk.
I am alone with the Emperor’s moon,
naked in the diamond light.
Senescence
To lie with the forest floor,
Pine needles stabbing from back to heart.
One hand on the litterfall, digging to the O layer,
filling my fingernails with the fecal dead,
the other on the scabrous pine,
prying the puzzle pieces adding
to the L-organic horizon.
The 4 o’clock breeze rustles down the mountain,
scattering the canopy litter,
blanketing my body in duff.
I become one with the detritus:
a home for worm, beetle, leafhopper, millipede,
wood sorrel, trillium, salamander, shaggy mane, morel.
I settle.
Settle into the senescence of you?
Composting with the creatures and litter?
Or go with the new growth of Dodecatheon poeticum,
pushing up from the humus of my mind?
I am rich in death and decay.