Featured Poet Karla Linn Merrifield

Featured Poet Karla Linn Merrifield

Karla Linn Merrifield is a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence. She has had over 500 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies and has eleven books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. A widely published photographer, she serves as editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye, and is a member of the board of directors of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society, and the Florida State Poetry Society. Visit Karla on her blog, Vagabond Poet.

To service the angel voices,

Jill the Poet sleeps around public campgrounds,
much preferring to meet her clientele in proximity
to owl, coyote, and armadillo animal spirits.
She unzips the tent to admit someone wildly hot
in the mold of Leonard, someone wisely shaped like Joni.
Jill in Lit Bo mode (wool plaid blanket as shawl)
is not surprised what her CD lovers can do in a cot
with Bob and Jackson swingin’ both blues ways. No need
to kindle flames in the grate. Next up Rod, then Bruce,
as the SONY MP3 player between her legs shuffles her desires.

Bêtes Noires d’Enfer (Black Beasts of Hell)

Man, woman, alpha, omega, infinity clichés.
I’m blighted with pallid rainbows, moons gone astray.
In Harlequin Romances and emoticons,
hearts grown trite defile my broken one.

But, once, blithely, moonlights ago, I bowed in rain.