Megan Merchant | This repeat of terrible history. | Poets Resist

Megan Merchant lives in the tall pines of Prescott, AZ with her husband and two Children. She 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). 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 the editor of Pirene’s Fountain, and an editor at The Comstock Review.

Megan Merchant’s Website.

Also by Megan Merchant: Gravel Ghosts In the Rooms of a Tiny House Unspeakable Light

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Ossuary Making Soap

Poets Resist
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 23, 2019

Megan Merchant

This repeat of terrible history.

“it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter There is little time in this life. I’m reminded when a Goldendoodle shags over the rock I’m squatting on, brushing my teeth. Such an elegant dog to be stray. The water swirled with mud red as a wince. The campground clutching quiet, smoke from last night’s roast — a whim of perfume on the sycamore. My grandmother’s vapor trail after she left a room. My mother’s hair. A king snake soothes through the brush without the dog so much as barking, as if she too knows it’s the good kind of snake, but still an unsettling and fangs. Still our warnings come from experience. I’ve been without text alerts for three days. Without this repeat of terrible history chasing me into sleep. A woman shouldn’t walk alone in the woods anymore. A woman shouldn’t anymore. A woman. A. The dog posts, alert, watching me. The creek bed flowing like cursive over rocks, steady, as if the same headlines of water dip over rocks again, and again, a kind of witchcraft, difficult to define, like god. The skin of sediment murking the bottom. The nearest picnic table stamped with a warning — don’t burn.