Wrong as three moons,
wrong as telepaths turned con artists,
wrong as an overturned crate of black-market lasers
on a rain-glazed street,
your verbs hide in their sentences
like deep-sea creatures fleeing the light.
Everything is a conjugation of "to be"
or an adjective. Without nouns -
snow, bed, thigh, sun, milk, bread,
cheek, hand, confusion, alien -
how do you mean, precisely?
Talking ends wrong. You touch my arm,
stroke my downy skin. We lie down to try again,
working on tenses of future possible.
Joanne Merriam is a Canadian writer living in Tennessee. Her work has appeared in On Spec, Southern Gothic and Strange Horizons, and her poetry collection The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005) is available online and in the UK. You can find her at joannemerriam.com.
© Joanne Merriam
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