Three Poems

Ghost Milk

My shirt on the floor
fell in the shape of me.
It invites me back in.
The sounds outside the
screen door could be
anyone’s children, even
God’s. The sky is the
color of Jean Gabin.
I scrape the marrow from
the last bone and sit
alone at table; all that is
left for me I eat: silence,
your terminal letters, the
things only dogs see.
The next morning all that
remains after a night
of spectral dreams is
a final remedy: ghost milk.

Two Dogs

I stood solemn and
spent over Fly’s
grave. The sky was
soiled linen. The new
puppy threw her ball on
the turned-up earth.
To her, death was just
another backyard game.

The Prettiest Woman in Lucy, Tennessee

The prettiest woman in Lucy, Tennessee
makes herself known tonight
through a savage music, half sound,
half metallic glint.

A streetlamp stands on a corner
next to a closed drugstore.
In the park across the street
in the daytime
children bring a hum from the silver slide.

Someone says, the sun is singing,
but this is not the complex cadences
of sunlight.
I know.
It is the prettiest woman in Lucy, Tennessee
combing out her hair.

–

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published 7 novels, 3 full-length poetry collections, and 3 books of short stories. He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. His fiction has received praise from John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Lee Smith, Frederick Barthelme, and Greil Marcus, among others. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN.

Lead image: “Milk Splash” (via Flickr user Iulia Melicenco)