Why ° Turns Me On
for Michael G. Smith
Such is the prowess of my °, superscript hero. no other notation measures up. ° gives me N43° W78°. ° coordinates the Great Lakes great geography of home. I’m not lost. ° adorns numerals to indicate the angle of afternoon repose: 45°. I’m napping. °, of 360°, perfects the circle; ° denotes Great Mandela circumferences. I’ve abandoned straight edges; ° rounds me out. ° warms me up with electric-space-heat: 85°F. Quilty-toasty. Mmmm. The clear-nighted ° of autumn chills my bones to 5.555555555555555°C. C-c-cold to my skin. Brrr. But ° blankets me. How cool is that? Clever Lintner-° of enzymatic activity, clever Lovibond-° transparency, I swoon. ° is my precise seducer.
Sub-Cellular Invocation
with a line from Michael G. Smith
If I am to get
anything done today—
follow a kingfisher fishing for mullet;
accompany alligators loitering, waiting
to leap (they’re lizards, after all);
emulate lichen like a circle map
of green earth on a tropical tree bole
(think fragile medallion worn by sabal palms)—
I must summon
a porter of atoms
far greater than myself.
If I am to get
away with anything this morning—
blast off to Jupiter’s watery moon
(front-page news, with mention
of extraterrestrial life); bow
to Europe, make gassho in outer space;
plunge into the Perdido River
of mangroves with mangrove crabs
and mangrove spiders—
I must summon
the porter of neurons
far wiser than myself.
Woman on Love
with a line from Michael G. Smith
She appropriated the edges of love. Later, she annotated volumes of it. In her love stories? Poets. She was always taking new names. I was moose; I was armadillo. Time— and love!— made her giddy. She wore totem turtles. She conversed with green tree spirits. Cosmically, she found home: the Universe. She embodied the metaphor of love. She placed lichen in the foreground. She came so close.
A seven-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had nearly 300 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has eight books to her credit, the newest of which are The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica (Finishing Line Press) and Liberty’s Vigil, as well as The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%, which she co-edited for FootHills Publishing. Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber – The Contemporary West in 2012. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com). Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.
Steel Toe Review 