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                           _________________________________

Michael Meyerhofer

Michael Meyerhofer’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Free Lunch, Chiron Review, Modern Haiku, Potpourri, American Tanka, Snow Monkey, Verse Libre, 2River View, and others. He’s a graduate of the University of Iowa, amateur weight-lifter and sword-fighter, and a naïve (but devoted) believer that poetry can save the world.

I poured my mother’s ashes like gravy
on the nest of wildflowers. The sky

was bright and cold today, winds
thoughtless as my blood still
pumping. This is not the first time.

I’ve decided by now that if ever there was
something fine inside me, it is broken now.

If ever I carried something—a vase,
say, or a delicate glass bird—it has shattered
long before this. I have enough:

a long dark funeral coat, strong fingers
and a knife for slicing open the bag

of well-enriched soot. There are prayers
but they stick in the throat. Useless, bent—
if there was God, the need has passed.

We are as it is, ragged as wolves
in the common daylight. Aware

of the weight of each breath, measuring
whether the heart should follow.
If there is salvation, I do not want it.

If there was water, it has frozen.
If there was memory, something ancient

and ancestral as the curl of fins,
if we stirred in the deep, it is finished.
We are houses propped by grief.

If there is God, keep him away—
do not relieve me of anything.