Love Song (6)

When she turned away my shame spoke its face
Tanned from a can wearing its awful straw hat
And rusted sideburns like curved knives
And in cocky seersucker suspenders sweaty
Spiting in my inner ear you’re not you’re too
And it fingers while mouthing the Mark Twain
Through its cigar-chomped mustache
A tooth-rotted
And tobacco-stained vernacular in the excavation
Of the mud-preserved vessel
I can’t unhear its jawbone’s gold fillings when it says
You’re a stupid mother
A dumber father of your futures
When she left my shame acted
It found me in my private quarters
Barged on in and pulled a cleaver from a leather sleeve
Hidden beneath my jacket slung left of my heart
It got what it demanded
A pound of our flesh
The returns on our returns

Can We Stop Calling it Blue Bile

If we haven’t spoken
In many years, the air
Between the trees
Thick as greenbrier.
If these blue marks are cuts.
If my boots are full.
If I’ve already stained the thigh
Of each pant leg.
If our fretboard holds
A fan of fingerprints.
If also the cap’s brim.
If cuffs and shirt pocket.
When footprints trail off
From the square. Disappear
Into the honeysuckle’s undying
And reappear along the stream
To the river and delta.
Then let’s call it a map
Of the blue trail.
The tune we made and how
We might teach them
To play it again. Instead
To play it green or orange.
The songbook anybody
Can take from the sky.

Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches, advises advanced students, and serves as co-founding and managing editor of Bear Review. In 2022, the Poet Laureate of Missouri published one of his poems, alongside those by MO poets Mary Jo Bang, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Aliki Barnstone, John Gallaher, Jenny Molberg and others, as a tiny book to hand to “readers who say they don’t read poetry”. Author of the chapbook Cloud Sanctum (Bottlecap Press 2022), his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Common, Contemporary Verse 2, The Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Poetry South, RHINO, Salt Hill, Southeast Review, and other such journals.