Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of the chapbooks Storm Was Her Voice (dancing girl press, 2016) and After the Miracle Season, which will be published in 2017 as part of ELJ Publications' Esperanza Editions. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Rust+Moth, and Hot Metal Bridge. She has an MFA from West Virginia University and currently lives deep in the North Carolina mountains, between a trout stream and a cemetery.
In the room we come back to
If nothing else, heed this: there is only one way through.
So our mother sewed us maps from the feet of wolves.
Only one voice—so she fed us tongues.
Little oracle, you too return to someone else's earth.
No one can have again the old answers.
At night, we lie down in the linens
in the press of the abandoned. Rabbits we have never known
hurl themselves against our throats’ glass moon, asking
for a little more time,
a deeper light by which to burrow.