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      July 23, 2024Ars PoeticaMary Meriam

      She took me home—or what I thought was home,
      but was in fact a hell she made for us.
      We left The Sound of Music with the fuss
      that I was making, working out my poem
       
      in sobs. She asked me what was wrong. I said,
      “I want to be there,” in the Alps, singing,
      twirling with her in sunshine. I was clinging
      to song, with nothing real to hold instead.
       
      She gave me pain—no comforting the way
      most mothers do, I guess. And so I wept
      like no tomorrow, out of love. We left
      for rainy sidewalks to the car, the day
       
      falling in dusk, the pity I had to make,
      the bleak, deserted street I had to take.

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Mary Meriam

      “The scene in ‘Ars Poetica’ has been haunting me for a long time, so it’s a relief to have finally brought that ghost to the light of day. Now some of the pain I felt has been transformed into the formal pleasures of a sonnet.”