EATING CRACKERS WITH MARMALADE AT 2 A.M.

by

Merrill Douglas

It’s the complexity I crave,
this mix of crumble, sticky, bittersweet,
tongue hiking around among textures,

tilting a bit with each step. I wish
to shrug off logic like a backpack,
feel my leisurely way

toward sleep, a cool, moss-laden
hollow in the cliff behind a waterfall:

thousands of pouring voices, braided,
shaggy, impossible to pick apart.

Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full length collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, SWWIM Every Day, Verse Daily, and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.