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  ABOUT MEGAN MERCHANT 

Megan Merchant lives in the tall pines of Prescott, AZ with her husband and two children. She holds an   M.F.A. degree in International Creative Writing from UNLV and is the author of three full-length poetry   collections with Glass Lyre Press: Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Award   Winner, 2017), Grief Flowers (2018), four chapbooks, and a children’s book, These Words I Shaped for   You (Philomel Books). Her latest book, Before the Fevered Snow, was released in April 2020 with   Stillhouse Press. She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera,   the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and most recently, second place in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.   She is an Editor at Pirene’s Fountain and The Comstock Review. 

PRECIOUS GHOST

For those who suffer from a skin disease 

I would have taken my son’s red wagon, piled with bleached stones,
cans of condensed milk, tins of powdered sugar and mittens
packed with snow to camouflage your bones. 

Sweet child, I swept the dewy morning webs from the cracks,
strung a pearled dream catcher, crafted arrows of pinched moth wings,
to ease you into sleep. 

No more dreams of rain sawing down, demons thrifting through
your marrow and veins.

No.  In this dream, you are the huntress, crouched in sways of grass
before the bright harvest, whispering to the tender day-beetles,
the peacock with soft-chalk feathers, the ashen lion,

and specs of silver ants that cannot catch your shadow. Precious ghost,
some people hear your voice as the thin rustle of leaves, but your iris is
the fullest blue moon, tanzanite in the milk-sky.

By: Megan Merchant 

Precious Ghost by Megan Merchant Copyright Reward Publishing 2020
 

HOMESICK

There is a splinter of whittled violence in us all,
             it floats about our blood,
                         or sleeps wedged as muscle
                                                                     hugs bone.

It rifted from the wooden heart of our grandmothers’
             mothers who had to hate a pinched
                        amount in order
                                                           to survive—

the honeybees’ stick       
                                    that breaks hyacinth skin.
 
But when bodies flee and cluster in rafts, carrying the smell
            of hibiscus in their hair,
                                    souk-dust on their skin,
                             
across the rickety seas, that rocking
                        can loosen the pick, stab and shrivel
                                                the familiar coastline
                          
                                                that keeps blood flowing
                                                                        to a heart. 


By: Megan Merchant

 Homesick by Megan Merchant Copyright Reward Publishing 2020​



DISPOSABLE CRY

For the abandoned children inspired by a CNN article “Newborn Found in Dumpster”[i]

Nestled in a hamlet of dinner scraps,  
snuggled deep, blue-black bruises 
lean into yellow in the morning light.
         
Did the journalist notice   how the dumpsters
lined like scratched      coffins     in an alleyway,         
bagpipe song of yellow tape     in the breeze

too early for eye-witnesses.         Did he notice the way                      
the steam     guttered    from his coffee,          
did he mind                 that it was too hot

for a first,         burnt taste,     
that the story was easy to write,           too similar
from another he covered                    months ago     

that left him unable
to peer             into the black canopy  
of city strollers                       pushing past.    

By: Megan Merchant 

Disposable Cry by Megan Merchant Copyright Reward Publishing 2020

           
[i] http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/04/10/dnt-newborn-found-in-dumpster.wbtw