Woman on Love

 

 

She appropriated the edges of love.
Later, she annotated volumes of it.
In her love stories?  Poets.
She was always taking new names.
I was moose; I was armadillo.
Time— and love!— made her giddy.
She wore totem turtles.
She conversed with green tree spirits.
Cosmically, she found home: the Universe.
She embodied the metaphor of love.
She placed lichen in the foreground.
She came so close.

 

 

                                    with a line from Michael G. Smith

 

 

 

 

Seconded

 

JoJo is my poetic alter ego, I shall not want.

She maketh me to emulate an Amazon;

she leadeth me into slut ghettos.

She restoreth my mojo:

             she leadeth me on the tao des outrés for kick’s sake.

Yea, though I hobble through early old age,

             I will fear no cops: for JoJo the Poet is with me—

             thy faux leopard and beret do comfort me.

Thou preparest a tableau before me in the presence of Rimbaud:

             thou showereth my brain with images;

             my iced coffee cup runneth over.

Surely kickass poetry and liberation shall amuse me all the lines of my life

             and I shall dwell in the house of Logos forever.

 

 

 

 

Bêtes Noires d’Enfer (Black Beasts of Hell)

 

 

Man, woman, alpha, omega, infinity clichés.
I’m blighted with pallid rainbows, moons gone astray.
In Harlequin Romances and emoticons,
hearts grown trite defile my broken one.

But, once, blithely, moonlights ago, I bowed in rain.

 

 

 

 

A nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had over 500 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has twelve books to her credit, the newest of which Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to. Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing). She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.