Poems by Jed Myers
Love Poem on a Winter Morning in the Empire
I confess—sore shoulder, aching
toe, tender wrist, too restless
for just one more stretch of sleep
past dawn at least—my happiness, yes
in this thick of my collapse
like twigs snapping then the branches
breaking and the boughs sheared off
in time’s entropic blast, the years
enough to take me down, enough
to gift me love. Two nomads late
and limping to their barstools meet
and learn to lean together—slows
the wind’s mean work a little. Breather
in the blow, like last night
you undone on my good shoulder,
moaning…. And who was it over?
Your thin son who’ll have go stand
up alone in his typhoon
America? Your grandma staring
through the wall and back to St. Pete’s
in a waking dream? Your self still
toiling for the boy-man-beast
who screams down from his algorithm
Everest of coins? Or did you mourn
for us, hapless arms entangled
in the ripping storm? Nights
like these, when you can’t help but let
the gusts tear at your silk composure,
this is what I’ve stumbled here for,
isn’t it? My creaky limbs
to steady you against the wrenching
weather. Long as these roots hold.
Our Use of the Stars
In our sleepy closeness, I think
————————————–for a breath
of the stars’ immense lack of tenderness.
And in that breath, we’re vast, the infinite
blazes a scintillation of plastic wrap
tossed on a gust past a lamppost.
—————————————–Oh I know—
our star is the great high-flung bonfire
of which we make love.
——————————But the love’s ours,
nothing like it in that hung furnace
we circle.
————–Even the cold-eyed soldier, aim
steadied down an outbreath to blowhole
a soul framed in a window,
———————————–turns gentle—
he’ll seep tears when his hound tongues him
at the home gate.
———————-I turn from one shoulder
onto the other, facing away from you
now.
———You keep an arm slung over
my chest, your exhalations an airy bay’s
tide on my neck.
———————I know. We’re burning up,
slow—not so slow, our crinkling tissue lit
live with fission-sparks, so I motor
my earthly lips inches to your wrist dangled
moon-singed in the dark—our use
of the stars,
—————our tenderness, torching us
within a click of the stars’ clock.
Jed Myers’ fourth book of poetry, Can’t Be Far, finalist for the Sally Albiso Award, is forthcoming from MoonPath Press. His last collection, Learning to Hold, won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award. Recent honors include the Northwest Review Poetry Prize, the River Heron Poetry Prize, and Sundress Publications’ Chapbook Editor’s Choice Award. Work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he’s Editor of Bracken.
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