POETRY

By Luke Johnson and Megan Merchant

For I,

I thought of you and bullets and the husk of ruin we are feeding
our chil­dren, saying swallow, it will make you strong, in the end,

but I know. When I sat the other day with my own loneliness—
as I have been taught—near people, but not, I lis­tened to them

ask about one of their group, who was missing. Dead. Fell off
a ladder. They laughed & it was true. One man said I hope

he suf­fered before he passed. He should have known better.
Then they swapped stories of near-misses and dumb decisions

they should not have sur­vived. Plug­ging a router into an amp.
String­ing holiday lights in the rain. I guess it’s hard to know

which side of balance we are on. Until it’s not. I’d like to stay
on the oppo­site shore of cruelty for as long as I can, which is

why I was sitting alone, why I’m teach­ing my son to swim,
to keep his head bobbled above enough to breathe.

The night my mother passed, I dreamt the town was flooded
and she was alone in a room, wall­pa­per peeling as if the print

of yellow daisies were windswept, not wilting. She was waiting
in a wooden chair, a con­cer­to echoing through the walls. When

I asked how long, she said days. The water up to her knees.
I was the one who carried her home. When I got home,

I looked up the man’s obit­u­ary and I kid you not, he was on
that ladder trying to save a cat from a too-high branch before

the storm folded into flood. Do you think that he tasted lighting
before it struck? What if the last thing we taste of this world

are lemons? Not bitter, not rust, but one placed in white bowl
on the counter. The light around it louden­ing yellow.

The rush of juice dis­solv­ing to the last sprin­kle of sugar.
A kind­ness. A single note held on a violin

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Randy Fath.