Multiverse Ars Poetica
By Merie Kirby
July 15, 2023
July 15, 2023
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There will always be a squirrel
running through my poem, there will always be a blue jay. This lake has been here forever, but moves high Sierras to northern Minnesota, sometimes holding cold flickers of rainbow trout sometimes gently rocking dense-boned loons. The insect changes: fly, mosquito, ladybug, shovel-shaped leaf brown beetle slowly walking the white wall of the bathtub. The poem wants to hold the moment, candid snapshot of one universe. Nothing is happening. It isn’t an event. There is no special moment. Like a polaroid of your mom in her blue eyelet blouse standing at the stove and stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce one Tuesday in 1979. |
Merie Kirby grew up in California and now lives in North Dakota. She teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have been published in Mom Egg Review, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, FERAL, Strange Horizons, and other journals. You can find her online at www.meriekirby.com.