Megan Merchant
We will pretend this is more than a poem (isn't it though)?


Hours scrawl then tamp. The night window leaks. Dogs mange the yard, hungrier every year. Or maybe they are different ones plugged in and pixeled. Breeds are so squashed together now anyhow. Purity is a relic. I buy an old phone, one that requires a finger to press each number. It’s feral, really, how unintentional we were, even as light raised its toothed corners and brail to our mouths. Somehow news clawed along about late trains, bus schedules, sandwiches in plastic wrap, oblong miles, and silence. The news about silence—the most difficult to bear—always. It’s fullness. In the kitchen with peeling paint, a mold flower blooms. Cranky dishrack. Porcelain bowl to safekeep my rings. I pack apron pockets with cuts of raw meat and wade into the yard. Weed litter. Chain link. Cad moon. When I braid my hair for sleep, I catch the stench clinging to my love line despite the pinked soap, the astringent hours. If we talk about the way touch can accident, then quiet into habit, we should also talk about incisors and spittle. How, through the phone, one hunger says goodnight to another, but not before that static pause, where there’s little left to say, so we breathe. 


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"Unidentified Female" by Megan Merchant
Composite with an image of an "Unidentified Female" from the Smithsonian Open Access Archives. 8x10 giclee print. 

Megan Merchant is the owner of the editing, manuscript consultation, and mentoring business Shiversong (www.shiversong.com) and holds an M.F.A. degree in International Creative Writing from UNLV. She is a visual artist and the author of three full-length poetry collections with Glass Lyre Press: Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Award), Grief Flowers (2018), four chapbooks, and a children’s book, These Words I Shaped for You (Penguin Random House). A Slow Indwelling, a book of epistolary poems, was also recently released with Harbor Editions. Her book, Before the Fevered Snow, came into the world in April 2020 with Stillhouse Press (NYT New & Noteworthy). She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, second place in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Inaugural Michelle Boisseau Prize, a finalist in the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and, most recently, the New American Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Hortensia, in winter. She is the Editor of Pirene’s Fountain. You can find her poetry and artwork at https://meganmerchant.wixsite.com/poet
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