Jed Myers lives in Seattle. He is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, forthcoming), and two chapbooks. Recent honors, aside from The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize, include the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry and The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Recent poems can be found in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Terrain.org, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Solstice, Canary, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.

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"The Truth Takes Lunch" was the winner of the 2017 Gearhart Poetry Prize, published in The Southeast Review Vol. 36.1

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The Truth Takes Lunch

I’m the tide rising higher, acidified

shoals, young oyster shells decomposed.

And the odd legions of rain last week

off the sea that settled your dust,

and, yes, mine are the clear-cuts’

mudslides. I’m the buried road.

Try to keep me in line. I twist

like a river. I don’t follow your signs.

I’m old as the asteroids’ ice

in your blood. Young as a thought. I quote

Noah’s dove—out over the flood

between these edifices, a leaf,

or is it a shred of document tossed

aloft on the turbulence, it flickers

chaotically toward you, and you take it

as meant. A message I’ve sent. Well,

I do watch the poles melt. I wash

the drowned white bear’s bones. I swallow

the earth-burners’ plumes, and blow

the ten million prisoners’ whispers through

the trees where you take your lunch. Listen—

I give you the gunman’s leer

like another leaf, this one in the pond

of the lens of the dead man’s camera.

I am that membranous small egg of space

that holds the fallen apple’s seed