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Meg Smith is a writer, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell, MA. Her poetry has recently appeared in Lyrical Somerville in The Somerville Times, The Cafe Review, Poetry Bay, The Horror Zine, Star*Line, Good Fat Poetry Zine, and more. Her poetry books, Dear Deepest Ghost, This Scarlet Dancing, Night’s Island and Pretty Green Thorns, are available on Amazon. She welcomes visits to megsmithwriter.com.

The Sky in Fragments

A man becomes a conduit —
blue and blue, in Gloucester.
He has traveled along the Ipswich River,
and must rest amid
the storm of swallowtail butterflies.
He’s rising, because with me,
he always turns, strains, reaches,
begins — even when breath comes
like streaks of pollen dust..
We are skidding in our footsteps
in the bright sand.
We are giving praise to the tidepool
of commuters, fluttering, legs, fins, eyes.
This is the mirror of life, above..
This is the mirror of scattered islands,
each casting a jagged light.
This is where he must go,
and the sea does not spare it.

Tiger Song

This was a dream I grew from childhood;
like fronds in a forest, dried, amber.
There was no place else to go.
There is no place else to go.
We held each other, in a sleep
grazed with something gold,
and in a scarlet mist to shield us.
Sacred in those whiskers,
sacred in those claws.
I still place my hand on the soil,
and what is now — this fine, black urn.
I listen to the dark earth,
for the growl, the shift of breeze,
the stripes of fire in the storm.

After the Bleed

Now comes all the talk about stars,
and the child of the galaxy —
no casket, no flowers.
What do we become now,
but form a constellation —
mother bear and cub,
casting north. Come, then,
dreamer of night’s backbone,
chaser of shadows.
Luminaries glow
on our soundless path.

— Meg Smith

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dougholder@post.harvard.edu