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