salver...

The world with its trembling oceans of salt
was formed at the beginning of time
by a goddess crying over a broken cobalt dish,
and that my dears is why the planet is blue--a blue plate special--
spinning in the void like an invincible dish
in a table-setting that we call the Milky Way. 

Believe you me, that all of the dish-shaped planets
full of mysterious and miraculous fare placed with care
like diamonds, in the ever expanding mystery 

defined as the universe, is indisputable proof that God,
is indeed, a vitreous-loving, kiln-carrying, plate-spinning woman...

lucy meskill

universion...

the greedy grape doth eat the vine
the apple eats the tree
shoes devour wooden floors
and locks devour keys

my thoughts like rampant wily weeds
encompass all the ground
broadcasting their fertile seeds
o'er every hill and mound

and silence is a wilder thing
that grazes in my soul
taking naught yet leaving more
it eats until I'm whole...

lucy meskill

curbed appeal...

houses that pass me,
along the side of the road
peeling in their appeal
too close to the highway
to be lived in, to be loved
have me thinking about a day,
the day, that someone dreamed
and decided to build them;
with a long sloping lawn
where once their cobbled path
eaten by blacktop, used to be;
about the day that they were finished
and where that someone stood
hands on hips exclaiming
“I love it, I really, really love it”
and how for most houses
peeling in their appeal
that very first “I love you”
needs to last a lifetime
because it will be the last one
that they will ever hear…


lucy meskill

wait...

translucent cellophane silences swell
outward from feelings not yet felt
fish-backs breaking water gently
displace in contoured undulation,
surface, like the blunt edges of a baby
yet unborn roaming clockwork, the limits
of the yielding and elastic womb

here breath mostly breathes itself
in slick, moist pink-lined nostrils
with bantam might recirculating,
abiding, contemplating airy exposure
where dust hangs on every breath, upon every
ounce of spittle imparting fleeting promise,
an emblem upon air, before it cleaves away...

lucy meskill