Two Poems
by Katarina Merlini
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
by Katarina Merlini
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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The Art of Nomenclature
your smell of grey pines reaching for tall redwoods, interlacing branches, red blotting out blue: I named you heaven. the curve of your lips like falcon wings, the wide cast of your arms when you delight in rain: I named you flight. your hair like sunlight filtered through saltwater, strands smooth as oil slicks; the way your body moves when you think I am unaware: I named you deep. I ask you to name me, but your throat lies empty. how can you name a thing wrapped so snugly in your skin? when you sleep, curled around the thin trail of hair leading downward from your navel to the jut of your hipbones: I named you small. Daze, It’s One of Those hazy saturday-sundays we spend on your full bed, pushed against the wall of your roommate’s apartment. but this room is yours. these flannel sheets, gummy with sweat, are yours, and we share something you have the authority to give. write me a poem. nothing’s real until you burn it into paper with clean fingers. you have poems. a hundred poems. folders and binders full of poems with your name written between every line, whispered into every caesura. not the leaving kind. the love kind. the love kind. there never was passion, ballroom spinning, get-right-down-to-wearing-out-the-mattress love kind. I won’t meet your parents, and you won’t meet my friends. we’ll stay pressed together under dirty sheets. you want a love poem. I’m strapped for material. ours is a dirge wrapped in crumpled love notes and a lighter spark in low light. I could read it aloud if you brought the light closer, but I’m too busy tracing the lines of your body as you billow on a windowsill, counting the streetlamps. eventually you’ll rejoin me, and when spring creaks turn back to silence, you’ll say how pretty my hair smells, fanned across your chest. |
The daughter of a first-generation immigrant, Katarina Merlini will become the first college graduate in her immediate family. She strives to use poetry to connect hearts and minds across all disciplines, to help find common experience in the most surprising places.
Three Poems
by Timothy Brockett
Oakland Community College, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
by Timothy Brockett
Oakland Community College, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
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After Hours Every night at three a.m., an ashtray-gray tuxedo staggers from the out-of-tune piano at the Loudmouth Lounge to a peeling rented room overlooking the freeway and hangs itself. It straightens its red sneer of a bowtie, knots one sleeve around the shower curtain rod, and jumps off the edge of the tub. There, in the Aqua Velva glow from the billboard outside the window, it swings back and forth, back and forth, a polyester metronome, snapping its fingers to the faucet’s doo-wop drip. To an Unknown Interior Decorator Waking up naked on your bathroom floor, I am awed by your cornice and your frieze, the chiaroscuro of your black tiles and your white, scattered squares of playful salmon. If this house were mine, I would do all my drinking on, or in, or under your towering pull-chain toilet. At the Sound of Rushing Water When the last breath releases us, the sun will rise to warm the river's limbs. Not that we go on somewhere else, but that somewhere else goes on without us, the continuing of what we named, where we shed our skin. Reeds bend within the passing current. |
Timothy Brockett is a published songwriter who wanders the world, playing music. He is currently studying poetry in Michigan and working on his first chapbook.
