Meryl Natchez
Shelter in Place
for Diane Seuss
Let’s meet somewhere outside time and space
where panic cannot grab a toehold, in the crevice
between the president and the antiperspirant ad.
Observe as the sun gradually opens
the cymbidium’s curved purple sepals
to its gold labellum, it’s top like a tooth.
Let’s hunker down,
explore our fear of opening, turn
toward the page, the screen,
the one who shares our food,
our bed, our worries.
Let’s unfurl beyond terror
to be touched
by bird or bee or human finger,
wave our delicate fringe
unique, tremulous, perishable.
Meryl Natchez is the author of Jade Suit (Hit & Run Press, 2001) and Catwalk (Longship Press, 2020). She is the translator of Poems From the Stray Dog Café: Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev (Hit & run Press, 2013), a bilingual edition in Russian and English; and with Tadeusz Pióro and Larry Rafferty, she co-translated Tadeusz Borowski: Selected Poems (Hit & run Press, 1990). Natchez’s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, ZYZZYVA, The Pinch Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Lyric, The Moth, Comstock Review, and other journals. She blogs at merylnatchez.com.
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