Three Poems by Meeah Williams

Sometimes I Think Of The End

I look sideways at my body
in the mirror stealing peeks
the way I'd look at a stranger
on the subway.
What I see are things
that shouldn't be there
absences where things
ought to be

What I see is a freak
I know I shouldn't be staring at
but I find my eyes returning
like a gazelle to a watering hole
where a tiger crouches
in the weeds.

My body is a suitcase
into which someone stuffed
the real me.

Kidnapped, tied,
and gagged, I'm somehow still alive.
But for how much longer?

Sometimes I think of the end
when a coroner opens
up my body with his scalpel
to determine the cause
of my mysterious death
and rising up at last
from the bloody Y
of my corpse

is the real me still looking

for myself.

The Shower Water Humming in the Stall

Your left hand on my ass
has always navigated me
towards the somber plains.

The white mornings in these
hermetic rooms erase the dominoes
even as they fall. I wander

through a permanent miasma
wearing only last night's mascara.
I was forever at the vanguard of nothing.

I will march until the butterflies
are old, faded, & famished
forming a dying magic carpet on the floor.

The slivered moon is as good
as artificial. It is a sickle
not sharp enough to cut my throat.

There is no death, not today.

So I will write myself a blue woods
beyond the fences
& a wolf to walk beside me

now that the deck is low,
the cards dealt out & all the dawns
have already been played.

Everything Is Okay

Let the stream crash through us
the way bears dance in the kitchen
on summer nights

flammable excitement wonders
the billboard grace speaks
fountains within us

I'm a painting that hasn't dried
my inner organs not yet
defying all personal accounting

but accruing phenomenal profits
light switches dash across
the room we're war airplanes

that forgot to write home
or drop our payloads
flying over unknown waters

oblong umbrellas beach
the whales rolled under
still singing in the plankton

mountains in your eye beam
so much Africa on your plate
you despair when the closet

doors are pulled open
until you recognize it's you
who've pulled them open

resplendent as an angel
these are our salad days
while the printer keeps humming

listen to the crows the bang
of a mug upon the marble
countertop my silk robe falls open

to your spider hands
everything is okay I've faith
in the down here below

Meeah Williams is a poet and painter from Washington State. Links to some of her work available online can be found at Neutral Spaces.