Poetry: Meredith Blankinship
An Important Message from a Mysterious Place
If the haunting was a haunting you deserved
how do you expect to live without
the quietude of my displeasure? The faces
that show when the film gets developed
harnessing all the fun of a lie to prove
something by transparency. When you
put a light behind some ice, when
you flick through with alabaster care.
The scrolls are ancient but predictable.
Who would know because no one
remembers the trees before light went
through a cheese cloth, before the choice
was a soft ball of accumulated grievance or
important messages from the beyond
in your tinnitus. I think I would like
a sandwich. Mayonnaise has become
as important as the soft skulls crushed
like sodden walnuts on the pavement.
Unable to see the crust of gold beneath
we made your mausoleum out of cinder
blocks, made your letters from exile
a burnt mound, a regrettably archaeological
find. The next morning I drank water
that couldn’t touch the place my throat
was eroding, leaving a pocket where
I recall you blowing on the soup so tenderly
for me. My laugh has ruined many things.
I dreamt these hands were dreams when truly
I slickened you, it is something to live
up to. Pleasure: the pinhole in the mind
that holds the entire world. You: body
unbalanced, body without keel. The light
clicks on by itself in other rooms.
Meredith Blankinship lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Author of Sexual Civilian (Epigraph Magazine), she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from NOÖ, Beecher’s, Heavy Feather Review, GlitterMob, Sink Review, and Finery, among others. She collaborates with the artist Dana Haugaard on Heat Rituals, a multi-medium project.
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