I don’t have much longer

in the playing fields of love.

 

So when he looks at the tip

of my ring finger and sees

 

under the bistro lamp a nascent

callous he perceives desire.

 

All I do is metaphor,

the steel g-string pressed

 

again, again, again, in B minor’s

third position–thus my hand

 

remembers what my body

learns of its embodiment.

 

I am the guitar.

Play me now.

 

Karla Linn Merrifield

 

Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 700+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the newly released full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye.

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