Women Who Serve

Why They Choose the Poem

Why We Chose It: Tour of the Castle

“Tour of the Castle” by Merridawn Duckler is a dark, eerie piece that makes the reader think they understand it, only for them to reconsider everything. The poem uses its passage of time to switch the story from top to bottom, and all with one, simple line. With that line, the piece is transformed from a poem about an accident on an abandoned, country road, to one that sends shivers down your spine.

The poem follows a car driving down the road in the middle of the night, hitting a red-haired woman with her car as she attempts to escape her life. Her life, as the text indicates, is filled with grief and pain, and her only chance of escape meeting a tragic end. The driver didn’t see her in the middle of the road, and so the traditionally fairytale-esque setting turns into a compelling modern tragedy. That is the interpretation the reader can make after noting the passage of time throughout the piece.

The fifth stanza indicates Duckler’s use of the passage of time: “Our car door slams against the rain” The next line then says: “sweeps the neglected garden like a backward clock.” It could mean nothing, just a metaphor to stamp the scene onto the page, or it could mean everything. A backward clock, sending the passage of time backwards, and making the reader rethink the beginning sequence of the piece. The beginning stanza, detailing a young woman following a car for miles, immediately gets deterred by “Tour of the Castle” seemingly describing a dark castle in which the women get tortured. At first, this may seem confusing to the reader, since one moment we were following a car, and then the lives of these new characters. The backwater clock, however, could offer an explanation. The last stanza, tragically, ends with the car hitting the woman. If the reader follows the clue given with the clock, they could infer that the first stanza is actually the second-to-last one in the poem. Three stanzas make the reader feel closer to the women, the last two bringing those new feelings to their knees as the young woman dies, trying to escape her castle, unfortunately coming into contact with a driver who didn’t see her red hair in the road at the dead of night.

“Tour of the Castle” by Merridawn Duckler plays with the very passage of time and the readers’ hearts, by sprinkling clues throughout the piece to hint at a rearranged order of events. Events that form a dark, tragic tale, of four women looking for any sign of help to escape their castle. A twist on a tale as old as time, ending with the car’s headlights meeting the woman on the bridge on the lonely, black, forest road. If this piece can make a traditionally prose reader such as myself feel excited about poetry, then “Tour of the Castle” is a must-read in the seventh issue of LEVITATE Magazine.

Inti Navia editor-in-chief and contributing editor in Creative Nonfiction

Read this piece in Issue 7 of Levitate Magazine!

Video Poem--A Genre

a love story

www.rulrul.4mg.com

A Love Story

you asked do you believe in ghosts
I lied yes
and a shiver ran between us.

                                                                       —Merridawn Duckler

 

On Introspection

On Introspection by Merridawn Duckler

 

Walking a Street with the Same Name as You

http://woodcrestmagazine.com/poetry/walking-a-street.php

 

WALKING A STREET WITH THE SAME NAME AS YOU

merridawn duckler

A woman pushes off in a skiff
across the ancestor of all glass.
The houses in close grow humble.
Back to our crap hotel, crunching gravel
that arrived as a boulder.
You are gone, and everywhere.
Maybe it is indeed all one wind.

Big Book of Nothing in conceptual works at Partial Press

A physical book which compiles conceptual books by various artists

 

Still Life With Thrifted Object

Still Life With Thrifted Object

I feel an affinity for the objects,

many hands touched and one hand

threw away. The discarded anniversary plate

after the adversaries have commenced.

 

Craps and edges, still cling, relieved of duties.

A jumble of unlike-colored items

that trash talk across eras

what it was to be exalted.

 

Even contraband was once up to some good.

The piece of the past missed in the present frenzy.

Beauty in uselessness. How a thing

needs to be moved to reveal a value.

 

The value in what moved us first.

I said to the dealer, look man, this glass,

improbably whole after crazing and contagion

a mother once filled, to satisfy a child’s thirst.

 

Merridawn Duckler: Cross Genre Artist Creativity Podcast

Merridawn Duckler: Cross Genre Artist

Commentary for FRiGG Magazine

https://friggmagazine.com/issuefiftythree/fiction/duckler/duckler-comments2019.htm

 

Last night I went to a concert at my alma mater. The professor of music was retiring, and in honor of that occasion were three public concerts from his body of work.

I like modern classical music. I like the squawks and jerky rhythm, atonal honks, nest of wasps of violin in a frenzy, and flutes going where only dogs can hear them. I think if we still had court music, it would be this, because modern classical music truly represents our lives: sticky, disordered, flashes of undeniable beauty, extreme puzzlement, guilt of happiness, etc.

I enjoy watching the musicians. So many emotions pass across their faces, like clouds in the sky. At one point, last night, the pianist bent down so low he almost face-palmed the keys and I wondered if that had been written into the score.

But there was something about the scene that was odd, and it took me a minute to figure it out. Then I realized the composer himself stood in front of them, conducting. I had never seen anyone conduct a quartet before. Why not? I don’t know that much about conducting though I recently read a commentator who said: They all stay so slim! From moving, constantly. I pulled my mind back from inventing a workout based on conducting and tried to think why it was unusual. I supposed it was because most quartets are playing classical music written by classical composers. They know the strokes, scores, and notes very well already. They are very familiar with that music. If their job is to figure out an interpretation that considers the whole history of interpretations, they can do that without any assistance, amongst themselves.

But this music was new. The composer said some of this stuff he hadn’t heard in 20 years. There was only one person who could guide them through an interpretation, mark the moment the oboe needed to come in, or where the pianist palmed. The person who wrote it. There might be a backlog, a history, and a past someday, but for now, this was it.

That’s what it’s like to write new work. The subject shows up, newly arrived from that triggering town, and you’re a conductor, making a space for all the players. You say something and mean something. Get everyone safely through it, together, to the end.

Endless

https://www.bureaudispatch.com/volume-05/merridawn-duckler-endless

 

The only places that comforted me were the thrifts. Seconds, second hand, second thoughts. The store hours were hand-posted and usually wrong. Doors problematic, too sticky or didn’t close properly. You had to push hard or pull soft.

I’d walk into them, mostly empty. Something rustling in the back. Shop keeper parts a bead curtain and peers out. Behind them, dishes piled by the sink, an open bag of old treats. We’d both come forward to stand behind the glass case that held whatever the market had called collectible. Look down, hands hovering, not touching the glass. Jewelry for unfashionable clothes, stiff dolls, florid cards. A teapot. Tea comes efficiently in a bag now. But some still want to see leaves crumple in hot water.

Barely audible music in the background The music is like the goods, no longer popular. But still, a powerful memory. Often there was a dog, one of those breeds with soft, short hair. A thick body of longing. The little face without answers. Pat the warm head, feel the short life pulse, unknowing.

Once I went into one while traveling. Tiny, depressed town. The shop woman stood watching me, bright eyes under severe graying bangs. Chin like a button on upholstery. She said just so you know all the romance paperbacks are on special. I hold one up. A man in a cowboy hat leans on a fence, girl in a flowered dress behind him. On the cover of another a woman, even further back, claps her hands while a buff hottie, stands, hands to hips. Camera snaps the take, closes. They grab their things and leave.

The sale of romance novels help fund the school, she said. Four for a quarter. What kind of school needs, at most, fifteen dollars? Local high school she says. I imagine the students in crooked rows like these paperbacks. She says two will graduate for sure. In this speck of a town between wheat fields. Well, maybe two. One, definitely. I conjure her. A girl. I put her picture in the paper. The imaginary town paper. She ordered a tasseled cap and the gown was an old choir gown. Her hair is the color of a can of Pledge. Her face smooth, beautiful, bright. She won a sonnet contest while her mother fried up tinned meat and called her a waste of breath. Hard to get the count right. She uses her fingers. What will happen when she leaves her home, where she is miserable but also first.

The woman leans back, considers me. She’s a judge of character. My outfit says not a romance reader. But maybe a supporter of lost causes. I go to the window and what I thought was a ceramic dog suddenly lunges at me in shrieking, furious rage. Skin back from its teeth and the roar like a siren. Jesus Christ. I twist backward, fall between the two aisles, tables of dress patterns, Disney ornaments, ice trays, plastic picks for olives and molars. Oh, don’t mind him, that’s just my Jack, says the woman. Seems kinda of mean, I say. My heart nearly exploded. I saw my life flash before my eyes and it was discarded objects. I loved that dog, she says. That dog? No, my other one. We had to put the good one down, or my husband did. I hear the shot. I mean my ex-husband.  I leave with a bag of books. I’m sure they’ll end up in the recycling, pulp to pulp. Sitting in the driver’s seat I open a page. In the first sentence a woman’s eyes flash. In the next she heavily sighs. There are no ex’s. Nothing dies.

Girls Daring Tides

Girls Daring tides, Netarts, OR

The water runs from my beauty but always glides back.

Far out the waves start, a green rose, pale belly stretched,

Orchid-split to sand curls, low down, mouthing foam.

 

My friends are beautiful too, as we stoop to grab rocks.

This one with a sign thrown from a boat: send nudes!

Our jeans rolled, our shape what makes the sailors moan.

 

Yeah, I know all about the mala gaze but that term short sighted

dude, for all gaze on me: moms, moons, oysters gulls

drop open at my lovely. The truth is hard sand

 

that crumbles at a touch. I am wind power, no one

see me coming but here I am, arms spread in my wind-breaker.

Nothing breaks me. A table of times runs over my bare feet.

 

Take that woman. You with the eyes on me and bestie,

writing my beauty roll over and back. I’ll be like god,

after the flood, asking what good will come of it. And out of the sea, I come.

 

Girls Daring tides, Netart, OR

Parable of the Skatepark

I wake at my namesake. Today is the day. Gold air, baby blue clouds. Sun on the rim like a blood line across the knuckle. I feel the board falling into the empty pool, churning my hairless gut. My big feet rise from earth. I’m king of that moment, only moment that matters. I was first to wake from the pile: Doug, Mike, Cory, Whisk. They reek. Smells like cheese food, b.o and the sins of commission in here. Someone’s music is still leaking out the earbuds. We planned to wake at dawn and damn here I am, the first to rise. The new park. They cut the ribbon yesterday. We’re going when it opens, before toddlers and chicken hawks. The structure is clean, perfect. Swims in fog like God’s own frying pan for my meat.  I stake my claim. No one believes me. Cory shakes his head and glides off, red hair under his beanie makes him look like an unlit match. He peels it off, the mullet flies free. No one thinks I can do it. I been falling, failing, cracking my head like an egg. But today I’m boneless; I’m vert; 360; rise, air, land. Today, I win everything. Everyone cheers. I open my eyes. I’m in a hotel room in Spokane. The dream. I’m sixty. Don.

Archive (^)

Fides

Fides

 

It’s a good life. Remember?

The smells, the stairs? Remember the boys,

their scent, their sound? Under their clamor,

joy scrambles. In silence, there is the cool floor;

shadow across the black, black iris. When it rained, the wet leaves shook their coats too,

remember? Scent of the quaking mole below, in bright heaven the

chattering squirrel. Each season, the one coming, the one going,

all good, very good. The man’s voice, the woman’s voice;

the forbidden places to sleep deep sleep

shaken by vivid dreams and the lovey stretch.

The bad things to chew, so delicious, such tasty

transgression; the perfumed garbage, the fierceness

upon danger, the whole body patrolling, remember? Triumph, then hands up

and down the spine, so delicious.

The idle fingers on the head, the secret rub under the

coffee table. The coffee! Smells everywhere. The wind,

was good. Go again. Flying over the sparked lawn,

no new day, no old day, but this one, everlasting.

Agave Magazine from debeljackitatjana

Fresh Hell

Announcing Casts for Playwrights Forum Festival!

New Works Spokane Playwrights Lab

https://www.facebook.com/NorthwestPlaywrights/posts/10159729455284220/

Fertile Ground 4X4

https://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/2018/01/fertile_ground_festival_2018.html

Misspent Youth, a micro chapbook by rinky dink press

Table of Contents

 

Anniversary

How to Ruin A Perfectly Good Child

Q: What is Youth

Artists Talk #18

From: The Girlfriends

Ode to Our Fore Mothers

 

Acknowledgements

 

https://rinky-dink-press.square.site/

 

Stylus

#12 – Merridawn Duckler

I scatter my enemies
as my god told    me
tho’ not my   natural
inclination I’d rather
leave them    on mu-
te, erase their stupid
faces & srsly escape
up to the  mountains
that cares zip    who
wins (the main goal
o’ mine enemies  to
beat me) since     all
lose to mt’s in  such
category as  majesty
beauty, height & uh
immanent dominion
I’ll climb     winded
as hell   concentrate
on my breathe body
& the fragility I can-
not allow the  least
of my foes to   sight
let alone delight   in
ever binding me   to
my shield, my    god.

Influence: Sunday

https://dialogist.org/poetry/2020-week-36-merridawn-duckler

 

I once dug through garbage
to prove a man did not love me.
Now as I drive around and around
places I can’t believe I sought, open like a robe.

Places I searched for, or stumbled on,
the creek inchoate, the trails dowered in maiden fern,
a night moon in painful relief,
were just as good as any gold sun.

All the while a person sits passenger and sighs,
complains, re-writes history, uses the subjunctive
hates being called person, wants named credit
for these dark, asymptomatic woods

passing as my own dappled memory. I crack
the window. Now everything is wind. I’ve changed.

Lover of Demons

https://www.westtrestlereview.com/merridawn_duckler_1.html

 

who meant to write lover of lemons,
now has to field so many messages, coming in all portals
it’s been a nightmare in the sense she has lost control
of her own story but is also responsible for creating it.

Look, these demons do not mince words,
they’re aggressive, entitled, awake at all hours,
aggrieved when they don’t get receipts
of their ghastly nether region pics.

And what happened to the yellow fruit she loved?
It’s been forced into the convent for symbols.
There it hangs like a mournful tumescent planet
far out of reach. One letter. One letter.

First Patty, then Others

Merridawn Duckler

We had never been to Patty’s house before,
a slightly off gal, in tilted cat eye glasses.

So, when Patty’s father slapped Patty’s mother’s ass
it might as well have been our faces.

We were childishly finger-painting.
The age—8—is for girls the division of beginners;

some still brush the soft fake hair on plastic ponies
whereas others look in mirrors to see if they are sinners.

The slap took place while Patty’s mother bent
to take actual cooked food from the oven

(itself an act of insult to our neighborhood)
and he goosed her though they were separated.

Our gasp of collective injustice could not have been greater
than for the cheat to whom one says: But you’re married

as I once said, quite stupidly to my first husband
before I knew they could be numbered.

But most of what was wrong with Patty sat
in the corner, her terrifying Baba Yagi grandmother

and worst of all, I had one too. The fear that I’d be lumped
with misshapen cookies, sad glasses, and a poaching father

made me look down at my hands, cozened in blue,
a color I saw only one other time,

when that husband took me to meet his grandma,
the sleek matriarch of his lordly, disintegrating clan.

Everywhere she went a servant followed
with a clean ashtray and weepy julep.

She’d been a great belle in her day,
and now everyone was afraid of her money.

She coolly surveyed me while my fiancée kissed her cheek.
What service do you attend?

Her doubt that I had ever been in any church laid on a tray
as blue as grass, Irish eyes and shipwrecked English china

followed my glance: our family recipe which in WASP means:
My grandson will break your heart in increments.

But I was raised to flee between two lands
and handed back the tray without even a tremor

as the old world slapped me hard
and passed me to her with coated hands.

Love Story in Marine Flags

#12 – Merridawn Duckler

I have a diver down; keep well clear at slow speed,
I am taking in, discharging, or carrying dangerous cargo;
I am maneuvering with difficulty,
I am moving to starboard.

I have been disabled – please communicate with me;
“I am hauling nets”
I have a pilot on board,
I am altering my course.

Keep well clear of me – I am on fire.
Keep clear of me – I am engaged.

I wish to communicate with you by: arms;
my vessel is stopped
their nets are caught on something
stop your intentions and watch for my signals.

I am pulling my anchor behind me.
I require a tug.

At a Supermarket in California

At a Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, as I side eye half of Whole Foods,
my blood sugar rising like Mercury in retrograde

In my hangry fatigue, celestial figures text me if I don’t stop munching hallucinogenic
mushrooms and add some leafy, green vegetables to my diet I am not going to get any thinner.

God the cost of these locavore peaches! Whole gluten-free families roam the aisles while
husbands sneak off on the DL to swallow a loaf of French bread! and was that Lorca inhaling an
entire bag of hot dog flavored chips?

Or it might have been you, Walt Whitman, as you supplement your majestic poet’s income by in
late shifts of ponderous embarkments into capitalism Capitolism!

I heard you ask questions of each shopper: Where is the moon’s penis? Were you the guy who
lost his generation’s mind earlier? Is this bag your own bag? Should I leave the coconut water
out?

You were like some food Columbo, (and there you were—wearing his suspicious rain coat)
moaning on about one more question as the cantaloupes shook with visible rage

That raincoat came in mighty handy, as far as those cans of over-priced organic artichokes were
concerned. Shop-lifter of souls! Shrinkage monitor of
the Eternal! Through the loudspeakers of the cosmos I weep the blues of cheese

Also: Where are we going, Walt Whitman? Also: I don’t think this place is open past nine on a
Sunday. Also: Why are these supplements locked in a case like drugs unless they are drugs?

(I pick up a magazine dumbstruck by the string cheese of possibilities that ppl actually read these glossies that cost a flophouse night)

We walk, arm in armed robbery, in this neighborhood—where do Whole Paycheck shoppers
afford to have set off the alarms of dreams & visions? The sky flashes a bag boy!

O let me be your beard, not that you need one, ok, it just a suggestion, yes, I get it–too weird.

I am lonely as the nothing that rhymes with orange.

Walt, patron saint of revision, extreme coupon-snipper of my soul, where is the American
section in the grocery of our consciousness? Are we only sad seekers of Italian or Japanese? Are
we lonely impossible burgers made possible by standing across from Safeway, holding this
plastic bag of pesticide-free oranges even though nature actually has a pretty good covering for
oranges already

Oranges! Oranges! Oranges!

Painted Hills, Oregon

https://blackforkreview.com/merridawn-duckler

Bone branches where the green continues to grow
décor the ochre vertices brushing the ground like rose knuckles
as we march round and round the stunning wound,
base coat, chalk, gorse, the yellow of crumpled formican
tables. So fragile the past! How it needs our signs.
Do Not Proceed, and still we walk the checklist,
under a clear and blue sky, followed closely by
a bird that offers nothing, except for teaching,
signs and warnings. The hopeful scent sage and pine.
sprays the forest copse
these thirty million years. The leaf fossils craquelure
celebrate brokenness, where history crawls back in.
Even as we steal land, it gives the light back.
These painted hills, everyone loves
their subject, how the rough, dust coated berries
black as the eye of wild daisy
burst, and run ahead. Our childhood runs ahead.
Nothing cares for us, and everything is a guest.

Back roads

https://www.jukejointmag.com/merridawn-duckler

And lo the land is sweet and there is plenty of it

might have been a hymn I hummed as a child

though I was taught no hymns except the automobile,

the curated landscape of wheat and hay, green and gold’s alternate.

Hills raise hair on my arms under this dipping cursive two-lane,

where you sleep beside me. Thousands have I driven this lifetime,

drowsy children, drunk friends lulled at last uncomplaining,

and once my parents non-characteristically 

to silence. I looked in the rectangle and saw them

asleep, heads touching like parakeets.

It freaked me out. I watch ages pass in the cleft rock

see the shadows atop the great Wallowa’s meaning

there is something higher than mountains 

the goat-faced try to scale. Myself, always the chauffeur, heat stoker.

Awake behind what wheel is why I drive, overseer

of my passengers, alone, and the song my difference, my un-taken. 

Taking the (silent) tour of the broad museum (virtual)

 

  1. Tap the comments and the comments will disappear
  2. as a stream of hearts float up obscuring
  3. Kruger’s BODY is a battleground
  4. while the perspective of a machina
  5. looking at an ex machina
  6. traverses the Broad
  7. reminding me of how I stood once by the Serra
  8. and said this work makes sound
  9. and your unforgiving face
  10. an underminer to make thoughts minor
  11. HI! writes MJ from Camden, NJ
  12. like the camera here only interested in edges
  13. forcing a view
  14. as if it was universally known
  15. what was important was outside us
  16. like a petulant child, jumping in place
  17. art as a playground
  18. history as a drone

Sonnet to Terrance Malick’s Badlands

https://www.wordforword.info/vol40/Duckler.html

My mind in this heat is a bloated dog,

I drive, fins in the arid between.

My debut is here, in the banked log

kicked and squished by sheen.

My house burns, the rooms ameliorate,

and I lock the dragged form to lone farms.

My back is at the moving gate,

a nuisance I want to hurt and harm,

and fill in with red embattled circles.

What is this empty, signifying hellbent story,

that must be filled with ridicule?

Idiots preside in the naked cottonwood of glory.

Women should know better.

Blind beauty before the unopened letter.

Sinner

https://www.wordforword.info/vol40/Duckler.html

I sent the goat of my stubbornness off to Azazel

but that goat kept coming back

tapping on the door with hairy hoof.

So, I marked the goat urgent and read me first

and sat back in the tavern among red cups, victorious.

 

But the goat returned and stood dumbly

in the courtyard, where a child scratched its forehead of coarse hair,

and it bleated a frustrated groan

that sounded like what grass might scream,

when pulled from the roots, separated from tender ground.

 

Outside the goat goofily chewed,

inside I slammed tables and sent books skyward

and in a lavish, enraged script wrote to Azazel:

Look, will you not take this expiated fucking goat,

according to agreed procedure, off my stiff neck!

 

Night fell and at three stars

I opened my shutters and the goat stood at my very bed

and (though no one will believe me) opened its long lips

and said (in the voice of an actor) Listen, pilgrim

I am now and have always been

 

a herder of shepherds, sending them into the high mountains,

looking for the old fragments. I pray from my pupils,

which see panoramically, with minimal blind spots

and kneel to where I am going

based on the map of where I have been.

Under Porch Light

Under Porch Light

Brother, we have grown apart. 
No more jumping on the beds.
Then when your wife spoke of her troubles
I saw your hands move, moths without flame,
exactly as our father’s did
while mother complained how it was too late to send
the invitations.
And his hands wrote out in the air
an invitation.

Art Guard

Three Micros by Merridawn Duckler

Is there a bathroom? Can I take a picture? The answers are yes and no. Sometimes I switch, out of boredom. Today he was back. I can’t leave. Who would guard the art? But he can come look at me anytime. I sometimes dream the hanging blob falls. I asked to be moved to Floor 2 to guard a bronze doughnut and a pile of shoes. No dice. He takes a picture. I followed him but was blocked by two women arguing about a red neon what it all meant. It’s the exit. Last week he missed a day. No matter. I still believe in art.

Sources

Fresh paint on every wall of the gallery, except the one where my big piece is going. Why? Biggest wall takes the longest to dry. Makes no sense.

2.

Ward arrived and stood out on the sidewalk. Smokes this candy-flavored stuff now. I said that does a number on my sinuses. He said Peter, be happy something on you is enflamed. We laid out a couple of paintings, all torsos. Kind of an odd orange patch in one corner.

3.

He said how are you, you ancient motherfucker. I said I’m fine. No complaints. No complaining means you’re dead, he said. I had the #47 against a wall. He said what’s the ratio this time? I said 1:3. He nodded. Nice.

4.

L’anne came to my studio. She was wearing some kind of tent. She said fashion, Pete, ever heard of it. Can you imagine when they feature you in one of those magazine spreads. Have Dinah at least buy you a pair of jeans. I said nice to see you too. She said the Foundation is buying stuff again. You’ll show with Ward.  He has these torsos. You’ll love them. He has a new boyfriend. Let me in. I’m freezing.

5.

I like them. I do not love things. I reserve that emotion for people. The long titles are ridiculous. I’m not crazy about my frames. They need to be half inch thinner. Dinah agrees.

6.

Ward was up on a ladder. He said how much of the cadmium can you detect from down there. I held the ladder as he came down.  We sat together. He said Jesus, these couches are uncomfortable. I said L’anne doesn’t believe furniture should comfort people. Buyers from the Foundation are hunkered down?  That’s the scuttle. He said, we’re moving to Barcelona right after. He’s crazy about Spain. We looked at the big wall. He said, it’s vaguely massive but not as big as the old ones. I said I can’t always get up what I used to. What do you think of the frame? Tactful silence.

7.

L’anne said Ward isn’t painting in there is he? He’ll fall off that ladder and break his neck, I am not paying his hospital bill. I am not made of money. You do it once and you’re beholden forever.

8.

The minute the stuff from Ward’s flask hit my throat I coughed all over my white shirt. I said, I thought wine. Ward said who on bloody earth puts wine in a flask? Here, use this. I said, you carry a handkerchief? I wasn’t raised by wolves. Wipe.

9.

From when I was sick, and it wasn’t nice to be spitting up everywhere. The least you can do is not use paper. Like some walking dispenser.

10.

Ward dabbed at my shirt. Did L’anne ask if I was painting on the ladder. Tactical silence. That girl is a piece of work. Still, the best dealer I’ve had so far. Takes a commission of maybe thirty percent less bullshit. He said what did you think of the article? I said such a stupid story by that moronic critic. Clout hound. I don’t work by accident. Don’t shake a brush and get wherever. It was based on the triptych.

11.

The direction of the splatter. Three discrete areas. It’s a triptych.

12.

Ward said, the Merode.

13.

Yes, the Merode! You know they’d paint a middle one. To entice a buyer. Something popular. An Annunciation. Good subject for a painting because you spend half your time sitting around, waiting for someone to come and tell you you’re anointed.

14.

Ward said for me, Mantegna’s Dead Christ. Dead, but not dead. The way it starts at the feet and goes upward. In the clinic I’d sketch and look at the different lamentations. Obsessed, I suppose. I asked him was this our first time or maybe we’d shown together in the seventies in Berlin. I had a sudden memory. He was extremely handsome, then. It was ridiculous to look like that.

15.

I said, where are those titles going to fit. Ward said I can’t read. I mean, I can but I’m dyslectic. In school I’d focus on the spaces between. I’d read those.

16.

I said the things about Dutch medieval is that the details in those paintings is just phenomenal. It’s not a picture, it’s a library. Whole world in a lot of little worlds. Just anything after Brunelleschi makes me nauseous. He said, sorry that my hyperrealism offends you. If it helps, they aren’t done from life. Or not my life, anyway.

17.

L’anne hid the ladder. Ward lay on the floor. He said you look like shit. I said thanks, nice to see you too. He said you ever online? I said, for my students, sure. But you have no platform. I said what’s a platform. Ward said are you shitting me, maestro? Such a smart career move, that recluse thing. I should have done that. I should have stopped going to those stupid parties a thousand years ago.

18.

We went outside. We looked in the window. Ward said, it’s like your splatters are shooting my torsos. Couldn’t believe how good it looked. Some people stopped and stared. I said, L’anne knows what’s what. Ward said what am I going to do about that orange patch. Jesus, I said. The light behind the building bounced. Those triptychs were made for cities. They were essentially urban. A form made for travel. Prescient. Part of their genius.

19.

From the outside the gallery sounded like an aviary. Dinah wore the necklace I bought her. A small fortune. A small apology for what had happened to me. I said go on ahead. I imagined everyone naked. It was horrible. There’s an alley between the buildings. Ward was there in some outfit. I took out a real cigarette and the air was pungent with the past. I said the thing about those triptychs is that the middle is for a buyer and the one before seals the deal, but the last one is strictly for us. He said a lamentation is meant to stop the gaze. You can’t get past the cock but you have to. I said indecision is where the painting gets made. He said who are you quoting. I said me. I thought about the two of us, moving the squares around and around. Days where we just looked. I wanted to say something about love but instead I said the Foundation bought the show. He said I know that. He said, we’re having a big success in there, darling. I said yeah, it’s the pinnacle of success.

Query Letter

Query Letter

Dear Sirs or Madame, I was pushed through legs into the hard world. Dressed for weather but left naked to mirrors. By the time I was sixteen, I saw seventeen coming for me. I was an early adopter of cloud formations. I managed laughs. I was never too proud to swipe. Eventually, corporate heads recruited me, from the obsolete verb to grow again. In the personal part I want to say I am commensurate with others in pain. For example, last night’s speaker, in the middle of the lecture, shrieked: can someone turn down the sound of that horrible, bloody fucking air-conditioner! And a voice in the audience that was mine replied: it’s rain. My eye is an appointment, circled red. My walk is on file. I have come full circle regarding the cherry blossoms. Where once I witnessed them on the tree; now I see them on the grounds. I know, excel. Contact me soon. I’ll come and go. Ask any moon. With all respect due, M

Parable of the Town Beauty

Many times from a rooftop

the red chimneys, brick and iron,

stubbed from so many fiery lengths.

 

I command what I cannot control,

the sun, if I rise first. I am the original

pukka, an unknown match.

 

Over lands I defy gravity, all graves,

the hollow bone suffused with red blood,

my own tremor and disdain.

 

Now the day is filling with its problematic

proofs, snakes uncurling around the fruit.

Remember, even when memory unglues

 

all my resolution on the revolving roof,

I touched clouds while clear-minded,

I would never go into my temple, drunk.

Dante Lecture at My Alma Mater

Three Micros by Merridawn Duckler

beside me the pale, anxious boys & taking their hand was like removing a leaf from the mirrored pond & when the speaker cited a page they had the book before them & went right to it though they were now husbands & CEO holding the place with a finger but raising their eyebrows where once they raised their eyes saying where is my guide? I have gone from poet to woman to dog & float on what was a pond no a lake no a river no the ocean no my heart

Shipping the Gods of Sitcom

https://gonelawn.net/journal/issue43/Duckler.php

 

I knew them better than my own family. The mother unlike any mother I'd ever experienced. Her beautiful arm clears the marble counter. Hestia. The piggish brother squeaks from his neat and orderly room. Someone has returned him to human form. Circe. He was Castor and Pollux, for they like to cast twins. The youngest, carried about emits ignored warnings, a baby repository of folk reason. Cassandra in cribs. Several dangerous sisters, arrayed like marble on stairs and couches. Tightening their hair ties. String. The fates, the fatales. Everyone coming into the room, sprung from the forehead, fully groomed. Fathers in formation with temporary allies: one neighbor, one friend, one co-worker. At night the screen is the width of my over-sized torso. My face pixilates into Medusa. Stuffing six kernels of corn into my mouth I wonder what they will have wrought for me this time. The last words of the oracle: No Talking Spring. Maybe missing a comma. No talking, spring. All my life I've wanted an altar. And a laugh track.

Dream Job

Once I had a job writing blurbs for dreams. I worked out of an office in the old Time/Life building, second floor. Underneath was a trainyard, though few used that kind of transportation anymore. The trains wailed on their way out of the station, as I laboriously poked at my computer's many missing keys. I can hear, but only badly mimic that mournful cry. All the ticket offices were either closed or not real windows, instead made from bed frames and fire escapes. Over my desk a fan rotated, creating irritating shadows I'd try to brush away, as if they were cobwebs. The city displayed out the office window was like my town but also not like it, some city from a childhood board game since we like to give children the illusion they build their own home.
My parking spot was up a steep lot, and I often went in by the exit, causing others to honk and yell. If I had to leave for an appointment, all manner of obstacles sprang in my path. In one direction streets were torn up, alleys abruptly went blind. Sometimes I'd end up trying to steer a broken trike while an angry or annoying or simply there-for-the-ride companion, whom I barely knew or cared about would comment and judge. Important people showed up en route, people I wished to impress or find a solution to, even members of my own family but they seemed not to hear me, though I'd always find myself running after them, sidelining penguins and umbrellas along the way.
My clientele skewed older, though occasionally a teenager would burst in with a powerful request. They seemed to feel their age made it more important. If they knew what kinds of things the adults came up with, they'd blush. It was tense work since the client had the right and even the necessity to tell me the whole dream, often in excruciating detail, but then go back over it for all the parts they'd forgotten. Descriptions defied their limited vocabulary. They tried to explain matters using various metaphors, often with mixed results. They'd shake their heads over disturbing elements that emerged quietly, like a long-ago childhood companion dragging a stuffed animal. Those animals can bite, too. In the dark corridors where no one wanted to go, the oft-times naked client urged me to open doors and walk down streets. I didn't want to do either of those things, but I needed the work.

I tried to get them to see the beauty in even the most outlandish dreams, but I wasn't the author, I just wrote the blurb. I'd lie down on my couch, since prone was how I worked best. I knew from experience even if I'd recorded all of our sessions or taken excellent notes, the dream would begin to fade, dissolving into smaller, fainter and more transformed elements, like ash disappearing into the sky from a passionate fire. I'd write "startling" or "important" or "it voices what we all wish we could but can't." Sometimes my pen turned into a stalk of celery or a snake. Without a doubt, this process was frustratingly antiquated. Still, as I unlocked the door to my office, or an office similar to mine but with different furnishings, a long line would have materialized, extending all the way down, as far as the eye could see. People stood, waiting patiently, a tale in their hands burning for a comment from someone other than themselves.

Parable of the Drought

I was rattling the inside of an old saltine tin when you came home. We’re out of tears, I said.  Again, I said. You put the bags down in a huff. They were supposed to last until the party, you said, where do they go? We both know the answer to that. You spent them. Pretending it’s for others, to be donated or sent overseas. But it’s crap. Everyone knows you cried up all those tears for yourself. My eyes have been dried for fifteen years. My mouth is like a ghost lake. Sadness scurries in rat feet at the bottom of my well. A soul could drop a rock in there and hear no echo. Whereas you are a fountain, bountiful crocodile. The world is your blue handkerchief, wrung once and snapped out fresh. I am sad, I said, I’m broken. I walked to the other room and saw you absorbed in the images, taking a screen shot and superimposing it on your face. What do you want now, you said. I tried to explain to you about my hollow. My dust. You turned your face to me. Goddamn, you are beautiful. I’m so sorry, you said. And your eyes filled up with tears

In Circles

https://www.nocontactmag.com/fifteen/parable-of-the-drought-in-circles

Every day we walk the waterfront to get out of the house and enlarge our circle. The balding man who always grimaces when he sees us. But it is a tic. The thin girl speaking pleasantly to air. Her voice carries. The super buff tall man, cutting quite close to people on his run, perfectly coiffed, his radiant shaved chest. The drunk one. The other drunk one. Couples follow us, since we are also a couple. If they seem mis-matched or glum, we raise our hands, to show one method. We have been in love for as long as there has been love. We recently admitted an international, from Canada. Long-necked, neck like a drain snake, with a purpose-driven waddle. Marvelous bright obsidian tail feather created a perfect triangle and the flat feet hid a regal spot of shit. On the throat was a white dot, like those that fall from paper when the hole punch does its trick. Species can join. Even flies, blown senseless in soft wind. The sun itself seemed to apply, reaching for the back of my neck. An audacious move, we’ll see how that pays off in the long run. A man leaning on the tall barrier that separates the strollers from the ruffled surface of the river showed no interest. It’s fine. We’ll be back on the waterfront again tomorrow. For the second time we saw that young girl sniffling on the littered bench. Eventually all will be in, sooner or later, willingly or by enforcement. This is our circle. You cannot put it off forever.

Parable of the Credo

https://louisville.edu/miraclemonocle/issue-17/merridawn-duckler

I’m done trying to say things. Saying things is a dime a dozen, or not even that. The things I say, you can’t hardly give away, almost have to pay people to hear them, as my listener nods and moves body parts to prove they haven’t fallen asleep. They have. They did it as a defense against the things I said. No wonder the center won’t hold. There is no center. Eventually a warehouse is erected somewhere unimportant, some desert or abandoned mall. The things I said get stored there, not very airtight, without much ceremony. Just to get them out of the way. Early on a few souls poke around, out of curiosity but eventually it’s a place wholly forgotten, a fly over. A hundred years goes by, and there’s a revolution that makes a big change in the world. The warehouse is re-discovered. Academicians arrive to open the trove as the public watches. Access is fiercely protected. People spend years trying to reconstruct my said things, bringing all the greatest technology to bear on the reconstruction. Outside the building a few highly trained experts in lab coats, deep in thought. A colleague was collapsed the other day that a word might have been lost due to system negligence. My genetic ancestor comes by, on the contemporary equivalent of a bicycle. Hey, they call out to the uniformed body standing at the entryway, what’s in that damn building that needs so much security. The guard is large, short legs, thick toro, a former convict, glad to have this easy job. They take a last inhale and then grind out the future equivalent of a cigarette. Move along now, says the guard, nothing here for the likes of you.

Night Fishers

Night Fishers

Water against the pier like a throat click. The churned blanket of our childhood bed. Lines curve back and fly into dark. We walked down because you wanted to see a super moon over water. On the way we pass a child struggling to keep up with his fast walking father. Father, turn to him. Your child is more than you will ever deserve to catch. We stand and watch the blank horizon. One of us is romantic. One of us is a map of capillaries. The night fishers trawl for squid. The legal limit is seven pounds. They are jigging in dark to attract the light-loving eyes. Some are successful. The rest remain hungry. No moon comes. Perhaps your charts are wrong. Below us the large, intelligent Robust Clubhook, full of ink as a pen, crosses the sea floor. I am freezing. We are rocking. We give up on the moon. As we walk away it rises behind us, huge and gold, according to timetables only roundness follows. Now the light-loving squid bite. The casters stand between buckets, feeling providential and singular, finding food where they live. A cratered moon, in waves. Thank you for catching me. Thank me for catching you.

The Seclusion

https://www.thesouthamptonreview.com/tsronline/2017/11/2/the-seclusion-ksz6n

 

There aren’t many examples in the family archives. We have that famous photo of Great Aunt BoDean, circa 1867, seated behind a wooden shack with ranch hands lined up on the other side, holding empty round plates. They’re missing their pie, for which she was famous. Her face is hard to read in the blurry photo. We’re just guessing it was a case of seclusion. I explained to my husband that’s what it has always been called in the family. It’s strictly female, but otherwise a cipher. No one knows when it lands, or on whom. Among my immediate kin it took my sister—odd because she was the most self-possessed, controlled person of us all. She’d been an ultra-successful business owner, wife, mother. Her flight took her across two continents and devastated them, economically. Afterwards, she regained everything and seemed completely unchanged. I told my husband all this when he asked me to marry him. He laughed it off, saying I could do what I chose. I don’t think he really understood. I didn’t myself. My sister and mother never talked about it. When I first rented the room in the flophouse, I planned to keep a very careful diary and finally expose the practice, for better or worse. But it’s been 17 weeks and I haven’t written a thing. The longer you are in it, the more the silence grows.

Game Theory

https://newflashfiction.com/?s=Merridawn+Duckler

 

Becky is a bully. Her sister, Corey, should have been a boy. These are facts which Corey knows to be as certain as the word facts, fat middle letters fenced in by two taller guard letters. Becky makes her crouch in spiderville, under the cinderblock foundation and stay there until Becky says she can come out. Once Corey had to stay until dinner, and she got in trouble. But she never ratted out Becky and the look Becky gave her over tomato barf casserole was a look to hold at night when a person is too old for dolls.

Becky can bully colors. When that man asked them their favorite color and Becky said “Purple” Corey could not see any other color. Purple ruled the universe. “Go outside and play,” said their mother. The man smiled down at them as they ran off. Now he makes a funny face out the window. Corey knows for a fact this face is for Becky. Becky ignores the men in cars whistling through their teeth, making a rolling motion to take down the window, while mom stands in the grocery, reading ingredient lists. In the park in summer Becky will agree to take free ice cream and money, but she never looks back and smiles only to herself as she tosses away the cone.

Corey is glad they’ve been sent into the yard to play. It’s spring. The flowers are crazy. The sun is coming over the fence like the word feckless. Becky wears no jacket. She has on the madras shirt Mom bought her that leaves skin between her jeans and boobs. When Mom came in that night to tuck in Corey, “There’s a lot in you to love,” she whispered, sitting next to her in the bottom bunk, making it hard to breathe through the beauty. “Never forget that, Coraline, sweetheart, baby girl.” Corey wishes she was a boy right that moment and then Mom could have what she wants: a girl, Becky and a boy, Corey.

Now that they’re outside they don’t know what to do. Becky throws pinecones at spiderville. Corey jumps on and off the big log separating their house from the doublewide. She starts to follow Becky around, and Becky pushes her away. Corey says “No, no, no, no.” It’s an invitation to play the game they made up. It has no name. Corey calls it “No Game.”

In this game a person chases a person, but that person can stop them by saying “No.” After they say that, the other person can move two times to try and tag them. If they are too far away, they can’t hear the No. If they are too close, they’ll lose. Corey is better at the game, but Becky is better at cheating at the game.

They play No Game in the back yard. They play near the rusted car they are forbidden to touch but they have. Becky screams and runs into the front yard. Her scream is beautiful and shakes the spring sun. Corey would love to scream like that. They stand in the front yard where Corey has Becky at the exact right distance. She has one “no” left and is deciding how to use it. Becky eyes her with one part. The other is looking at the man at the window. Mother left the room and he is standing, watching them. He taps the glass. “No,” says Corey. Becky starts to gallop like a horse around the yard. She gallops in ever tightening circles, then adds a head toss. Only Becky would think of that, her hair flying in the spring air, the pucker of her shirt crawling up, the frayed top of her jeans, riding down.

Scottish Air

Scottish Air by Merridawn Duckler

At the Glasgow B&B. First of all, why do I even book a B&B? I am not social in the morning. In the late afternoon, no. At night, about as sociable as stars. Shared bathrooms. OK, my bladder is sociable. We ring the bell several times and wait. Finally, our host lets us in. Red, impish face, the features squeezed tight. He looks like Ed Sheeran in a French press. He says: we’d like some tea. It’s not even a question. I’m floored by this hospitality. When have I ever offered anyone tea? I usually ask them if they’ve brought me coffee. And where we plan to go in Glasgow. Really? Those places? Not one of those places is all that great. We are taking the bus? God’s mercy what is wrong with us. Here’s the brochure for what we’ll be wanting—a double-decker that goes all over. My harmonic convergence with the Scottish temperament. We are both hella thrifty.

Our host strongly advises us to visit the cathedral right around the corner. Magnificent cathedral, most red cathedral in all of Europe. Also, free. Mentally I raise my hand. Question: I am an infidel. How many infidels are getting mauled in the stained-glass windows of this cathedral. In short, how stained is that glass?

But of course, we go. When it comes to travel, I am as suggestible as an infant.

Entering the cathedral I feel the old Shakespearean love of the stones, the mortal cold. What a wonderful idea, to gather in grandeur. The wall label states: a king needed to be murdered so they did it here. Practical. Dragging around the moors—why. Who would ever find each other? Murder in the cathedral every time. Eliot reference. There is a Lego exhibit. The ghost of Martin Luther is not going to like that, one bit. On the other hand, he was no friend of the infidels, was he? I give a defiant hosanna in praise of the plastic blocks of childhood.

Wooden box in which to leave prayer requests.  My prayer request: God give me the strength not to open that box.

There are three large wooden pieces left from the original cathedral which was built in (14?? Look up) and survived fire, human emotion, carpenter ants, brimstone. Two are chunks of wood, indistinguishable from some we saw at the construction site on the way over. The third is a carved exact replica of our host. I suddenly remember how he handed me a bottle of beer and we never saw him again. Hereafter we only interact with his granite-faced wife, who seems disappointed by our unending toast consumption. More toast? What is she, a baker? She makes certain we never see our host again. He has been handing out bottles of beer like it was river water. God’s mercy what is wrong with him. In parting, I leave my bottle of beer on the table. I am an infidel pilgrim, this is my offering. Please God, make me hospitable.

II

On the drive north the long, lush fields, divided into squares. Rain arrives on the back of the sun. My tears, my tears. The present only touches me. Robert Burns reference. All our stay a wind blows through us in osprey, seas and stone. Bagpipes, the national instrument depends on this wind.

III

Thoughts on the castles. Very hard to keep clean. You could not be overweight and live in one. If you’ve seen one castle you have not seen them all. Some are droopy and sleepy. Others are pretentious and bustling with new ideas. In some the tour guides finger their plaid ties in a particular Scottish sadness, describing the scullery maids. In others stern women in A-line skirts and thick shoes don’t approve of all these people clomping around, touching stuff.  The gift shops are maintained entirely by beautiful Scottish girls with creamy skin and hair the color of mineral stain, raspberries, deep blush and the sky from which all sailors know to take warning.

Ghost employment. Ghost unemployment is quite high now. Do the math—there are only so many castles and not really building new ones. On the obverse, the ghost population grows daily. The ruined ones are inhabited by so many ghosts there is a line to get in. Ghosts in the gift shops, in the tea shops. Ghosts examining a tartan for the rival crest, others stretching and yawning. The empty seat on the bus is not empty.

But not one of them wants to leave the rocky coast, bad weather and shocking price of avocados at the co-op. Where are they going to go. Spain? Please.

IV

You will swell with pride. Your calves will grow to the proper size to bulge under that kilt. Your beer consumption will inflate. The vision of the girls with pointed toes leaving the tarmac altogether in an Eadweard Muybridge vision will cause your eyes to bulge. Caber toss. They are throwing whole trees around like a toothpick. The sight of them will tumefy the horizon. Tendency to self-deprecation has an antidote. It is called the Highland game. We saw the clans gather, imbibe, race in kilts and march in formation of pipes and drums relentless as tides on the North Sea. You are not even a little Scottish and it saws through the ice that has accumulated in your thrifty heart.

Bought books in the Oxfam: Pico Iyer, Walter Benjamin. Had to leave them on hold while we got change. “Is this your Christian name?” says the saleslady. My eyes fill with tears. It’s about as Christian as I’m ever going to get. In IlluminationsBenjamin writes “Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock…” He’s writing about books, but it is the truth of all our travel. Scotland. I feel the pedestal, base and frame. As for the lock, all travel comes in fours: in fantasy, in body, in memory, in dreams.

Blaze

I am emptying the fireplace ashes so you can make a fire to seduce me. There’s a pile of tossed bills to be burnt because they have information someone might steal. Our signatures. The pile suggests, via nonrelativistic classical mechanics, a closed system: paper made from wood, wood burning paper. No rock. Maybe a pair of scissors is lying around here somewhere. I am filling the bag as fast as possible because seductions are time-sensitive. The height, the weight, the heat, all are factors. Over the bag a cloud forms, sly and ashy, solid remnants of the once mobile. The signature of a fire. The faster I empty the ashes, the faster the ash cloud moves like that mist we drove into yesterday while we were arguing about metabolic syndrome. We were leaving the mountain and going into the valley. The mist arrived so quickly, began to rise and fall around us. We had fallen into farm country and there was a winter field, half of it rolling in dark like ground crows, the other half wearing luminous rollers like hair from the fifties. At the sight we touched hands, yours were super cold and mine were burning up. That’s the difference in our metabolic syndrome. The bag is almost full. Experience proves that if I put this in the recycling bin, it will still be there in the afternoon with a stern note from the trash man. I have longed to write him back: wasn’t this ash once paper and wood, items which can be recycled? Please explain. Explain this bag full of trees transformed into a rising film. Don’t just give me a pamphlet with a checkbox. I’d prefer to hold such a note, standing in the street in my negligee, from the root of the verb to neglect. I’d hope to look like someone from that Aerosmith video that would be deeply problematic today. Still we’re all trying to be seduced. The sight of that field is in me and in you. Burn it up.

Slow Waves and Delta Waves

Slow Waves and Delta Waves

Mediums can only half sleep, plugged into the constant dead, who never rest but complain and petition, want favors and reassurances, want even love, of a limited kind, before the disaster of forgetting descends. Next to me in bed, wrapping the sheets tighter, you are a breathing wall of great shoulders; cried of hounding, making fists like a child with a pencil, record is your only recourse, you on one side, the long ago decreased with a champagne glass pressed to the other.

Earth Room

Earth Room

In sleep I feared my soul would divide,
range free, having shrugged off the body,
go down to my basement where I once slept walked as a child,
our official childhood photographs, tilted a nail’s width.

My feet glided like that to the Earth Room,
behind a nondescript door in Soho where an angel sat
at a desk & pointed to the sign: no pictures,
for aren’t angels always pointing at things

and forbidding you to take them? The dirt was undulant, pure black,
verdant, like Walter de Maria’s hair, filled a former gallery
packed in since 1977 for me and this other guy
to gaze at in awe and when I turned away I saw

him wave to a man across the street in a window,
just transferring things from box to box,
exactly how my feet moved in sleep walk
all hoard and squander crushed like thyme under each sole.

You aren’t supposed to wake sleepwalkers, moving toward
their sure destination, for the soul is shameless about orders.
That dirt was dark as cake. Since the artist forbid reproduction
I took a memory instead of you, love, smiling under a great stair.

A Genre

19th Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Poetry Issue

I went to the horror film
with a victim of its horror,
and though he was not my relative
I kissed his cheek,
blue track veins
under skin of winter paper white.

Various “miracles” had brought him
to this not very clean theater;
silent on that subject,
he took his seat among those with no idea
this was his life.

And when they loaded the trains, he was the cargo.
And when they dumped the ashes, his were absent.
The projector has no conscience,
in dark we sit
as events unfold, before one who folds his eyes.

Reading Charles Simic in the Chaos

 

https://www.pioneertownlit.com/reading-charles-simic-in-the-chaos-by-merridawn-duckler

Reading Charles Simic in the chaos
of the living room
where the furniture has so forgotten it’s place that chairs
sit on other chairs and many things we told others we’d keep
are broken like a promise, precisely in half.

Time empties the living room, first the brown couch,
then the table with six mustard colored tiles laid like fingers
with one missing, then rug, lamp, piano, blinds.
And every time I exit with an object,
the ones left behind grow more knowing,
like two women sharing a glance;
and I think: if Vesuvius covered me now,
I would not be able to hide what I am.

 

https://www.loc.gov/item/94838900

Morning Lesson

Morning Lesson by Merridawn Duckler

I’m lying in bed but my legs feel

roughly half the length they should be.

I’d dreamt I smuggled a fat person into a fast food franchise,

so it has been a productive day thus far.

But these legs bother me.

Am I walking on what should be the knees?

Wouldn’t my life have been entirely different if my legs crept

down for several more inches? At the movie

last night a giant woman beat me into the bathroom.

What if I had her legs? Thighs like a freeway underpass?

Calves screaming in the stock yard to gallop free? I’d rule the world

instead of just this dream, lugging my special burden.

The Russian proverb: a small dog stays

a puppy longer broods me. Look, I did mail that check

to the therapist, OK? He’s not sitting with the new patient, frowning,

thinking: you ungrateful jerkoff who I helped and helped, you never paid me

while the poor patient quakes with neuralgia in the shit storm of the soul,

wondering what hit him. Now he’s calm. Paid.

I did that. Me and my small feet.

Aunt Sad

https://www.star82review.com/5.1/duckler-aunt.html

 

She lines up the hot wheels good.
But when one backslides she says rat bastard.
She makes Crazy Monkey talk
and laughs when he talks to her.
At the loud party, Aunt Sad is on the outside.
Smoke leaves her nose like a dragon.
She puts her finger in front of her lips.
I sit and she points out the stars.
She doesn’t know the name of that one.
But those two are Great and Little.

No Single Answer, Agony Column, Cosmopolitan Magazine, May 1988

Merridawn Duckler

No Single Answer, Agony Column, Cosmopolitan Magazine, May 1988

Q; My boyfriend wants to see other girls (sic)
Meantime other other girls hide in their
bushes. Now I go out kind
except my crouch, hair, nails, clothes, erasure
clutter, these rainbows, these inserts, my whiteness,
Nothing works, right?
For contrast, my heart is 21, his penis is 27

A: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Q: Having an affair with strict missionary
I’m the top. But I’m all like
Think, moron! What is under them?
Is it an adventure, an affair
am I (an) adventurous?
I’m writhed in un-confidences, sitting
tuck toe between numbered ads. I am fat.
K. If you cud. Map it out for me.
Should I be prehensile by now. Be real.

A: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Q: I went to college. Girls went to college.
Coffee shops went to college. Class warfare
went to college. At home, high school weeps.
Sigh school burnt the experiment. I am above
dorms. College is so full of empty forms!
Feeling a cliché tighten. My flawless necks
collar me. Here’s my numb.

A: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Q: I I I I have a career. Money continues page 79
No one cares I am not giving up.
F-bombs are scattered over the laws
under the big building. I love them, in a sense.
Where is this green in my stained hands?
The hard work of being a child
turns out has no compensation. Help me, Irma. Get him out of my house.

A: HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Q: Married. Coffee. The light comes and goes.
He screams of tragedy and follows me into lunch.
I’m pretty sick of it but think on the solo. A long convoy
of hounds follow, panting, slobber.
At my works I look out the window. He is in bushes.
I pity his disguises. I write to you for the nail color
to nail him. Don’t tell me how cops feel. You are laughably my hope, joy.

Answer: She is all these people.

 

No one to stop me from taking from the waiting room, Via Magazine, Spring, 2019

https://positjournal.com/tag/merridawn-duckler/

 

Waiting for medication, I dream of Fresno.
Kristi Yamaguchi, writing on a silver wall had tried twirling, moving a ball from side to side.
Now she is start-fish and lavender, a queen and an author.
In the best parks, at Point Lobos, a little cabin where fishermen trembled.
In the Valley of Fire, a garden of rocks.
At Slide Rock, the junipers are suffused, as we hunt for that verb the good part of an afternoon.
In the Lewis and Clark Caverns, caves never entirely empty.
At Antelope Island, the pronghorn.
In the best of state, mine was Silver Falls, where once I stood under the roar and understood this land was lodged in me like a bullet.
Left out was the little park in Fresno, where I dedicated myself to only one god.

This is what we should do.
I guess, we eat first, in Trinidad, by someone with the name Bridget Hand.
I yearned to write names for these bougis! Pages and pages of turnstiles and castles.
Where have I wasted my life next?

Gerhardt Richter’s Five Grey Mirrors

Merridawn Duckler

Away they are matte.
Close by they are a gloss.
This one is a piece of sky.
This one is a landing strip.

All are the windows of a train.

The gas is so undetectable,
as we sit in the designated chairs,

still, they will not allow us
to return home.

Based on the Super Annoying Prompt

https://medium.com/emrys-journal-online/emrys-journal-online-issue-1-4-5833c956fed7

Someone has written Sarah on the porch

on the back of this handed over photograph,

for me to work on.

Who the hell is Sarah?

Why is she on the porch?

In this eighties outfit, a tube top!

That’s why my mind goes to Elie Tahari, who everyone thinks is a woman

but is actually an Iranian guy.

He came to New York City, walked the streets

of his adopted home, hot and dirty, beautiful and remote.

There were a thousand like him but maybe none

from an orphanage in Rishon L’Zion, founded by Russian immigrants,

escaping pogrom, in the time before

an even worse thing than pogrom

is coming.

He kicks off to America with less than a hundred damp American dollars,

burning designer holes in his pockets.

Rishon was hot and dirty but not like this dirt! American dirt! Where anyone

can grow a pair, in the rich, uncaring and abundant nutrients of the new world.

He takes in the local sounds: screams of joy of those making it!

In the disco he side eyes side boobs squished into basically a bandanna

and thinks, that’s the pair.

Then the prompt starts making me do this and that,

bossy and directive,

competitive and snippy, similar to the New York Elie saw,

filled first with hope and then blood of his ex-wife. No, not because she

scratched his eyes out — they loved each other — but because he believed love had cured his diabetes

and then had to go into the hospital because love

does not cure diabetes.

Nor can it be prompted.

Nor can you predict when it will fall into your hands.

Don’t Go Out

Two Poems by Merridawn Duckler

I’d woken up happy, not reasonably happy but deliriously so, nationally so, happy as if I’d
walked into a diner at the end of a long road, with ruffled red/white calico curtains and lightly
squeaking neon, nodding to a few grizzled regulars, brave face toward the mirror hung over long
wooden bar, nicked with prayers in the form of lottery combinations, behind the scenes some
dude cooking for the love of God, stirring, patting, not rushed, but measured as a salt lick and the
bartender just so beautiful and not at all inclined to deny you anything, as I slow stroll over to the
jukebox sitting right there, yea high, at the level of the heart of a child, in boots of well-tooled
leather and a booty looking fine as a dream everyone dreams at the same time, and I have no idea
how I ended up in this grocery with greeters who slap a big target on your back, overhead public
address screaming can someone clean up the soul dancing in aisle two, they are a hazard.

 

Santa Fe

Two Poems by Merridawn Duckler

Between the pueblo and the faux-eblo
the forest of spectacular mesa flies alongside
the route marked by my dust.

The odd spindly red chimney,
beggared for a few thousand millennia
ringed with semi-precious fallen leaves

under the abandoned white bride of trees,
yellow like loneliness,
the color of a wolf-eye yearning to be caught.

Here roadside altars await their accident
closed shops are marked open and there is a walking rain
but it is walking away from us all.

I might be one of the dead
except the dead can only startle, not surprise, us
like this deep shawl tossed purple sky

I describe in all the richest swearwords,
ever a pueblo dog that howls with no embarrassment,
willing to tear to pieces for the love of all that stands guard.

A Clinic

https://www.splitrockreview.org/duckler

 

A Clinic

The man who must discard seven years of records

sits on a stool before the fireplace, poking wells in the burnable hours.

Names fold into themselves, numbers and acronyms

on some body that paid or didn’t; recovery, relapse, a knee

he remembers shaking gently like a snow globe

the fragments dividing like ash—all transfer to smoke and air.

First the papers burn hot, loud and crowded

then blue and thoughtful, a jazz score

then grey, something to stamp and deaden—is it possible to watch

words burn without wanting a philosophy?

As a child he made emptiness bright

at the campfires of his useless family

now he sits, not sentimental but in a celebration for which

there is no card. Seven years burn in seven days.

He made up a system, something about packing the firebox at night

and banking embers against the new day.

Saga of the Grief Journal

Saga of the Grief Journal by Merridawn Duckler

I.

I drew an angry, enraged face in the grief journal
then covered it up with a kind face
then covered them both with the kind
of face that pretends it is not angry and enraged.

I wrote on every line of the grief journal
but I left all the T’s uncrossed
because I am not a Christian
and I only kept the diacritic dot because of “tittle.”

Tears in the grief journal
caused the binding to un-glue
which points to a defect in the manufacture
as well as a metaphor too large to copy.

 

II.

I met the grief journal and slept with the grief journal
and had breakfast with the grief journal and learned all about
the grief journal and met the friends of the grief journal
(but not the mother of the grief journal) and was often bored
with the grief journal but acknowledged the grief journal
alleviated my loneliness and then I fought with the grief journal
and had fantastic make up sex with the grief journal and felt closer
to the grief journal than to anyone ever and when I married
the grief journal and had children with the grief journal I
knew years of joy with the grief journal except I became
more fearful of love than ever in a way because as I held the sleeping grief journal
I wondered what would happen to me when the grief journal died.

 

III.

I cannot bless the grief; I am no god.
But I can bless this idea: that somehow
all of this goes on, and somehow I am in it.

 

California

Everyone looked pissed they’d won the weather lottery.

I feared for my immortal soul, i.e., that no one would bid on it.

By Smart and Final (store and commentary)

you hated me as much as the compostable

plates I made you buy, composting in the trunk.

I realized we were driving ghosts                                                                                       

who would never leave Los Angeles:

the blue plate special sky, drive-by bougainvillea;

the freeway where an old exit to Pasadena appeared

and you pointed, saying: Look, from when there were only baby freeways

and no one understood merge

Ginsberg at the Grey

Ginsberg at the Grey

How belly they aged, your friends,
how hard the young years,
every look, an eye for an eye,
rapscallions when this country had corners
rounded to secret, sweet places unfound by blab and tweet. In that famous photo,
which stood over my desk so many years, I regard the defiant penis
on Gregory and you,
but here, in the Grey Gallery, I see I missed the smile hidden in the cross hairs.
In ten years you all go from men so sleek and lovely
you’re as lickable as the skin of a 1956 El Dorado
to, you think, old fucks so shriven and used, you’re as despicable
as a map destroyed by needle tracks.
Later, it seems you took pictures of the miraculous every day
the shocking verdant vacant, outside a window

and tried to believe “things are symbols of themselves.”
But you were my symbol
when we met. I wore my heart on my silver pant leg
which you fingered, saying “They let kids wear this to high school?” We were on the corner of Telephone and Telephone.
That night at the Neighbors of Woodcraft, my lame pants jangled
to your terrible voice and your beautiful tambourine until I fled, complete.
Is it better to throw ten wild ones to the wind and
get back twenty of pain and misery?
Is a question I ask myself
as we both walk the mandala,
passing out the door of the exhibit, you ever the giddy teen girl,
me, always with a wild old man in my heart
to the young boys strolling NYU and fall to our knees before them
mouth on the first of ten thousand bows.

What Fashioned Me

What Fashioned Me, by Merridawn Duckler

I was the offspring of mommy jeans and a boyfriend card;
I adored my Grannypanties, and lived for meggings and a biketard.
When I was sad, I got Dolman sleeves;
my shrug shrunk, sometimes even my top would trapeze.
Eventually I went double breasted and found a sweet heart neck,
despite some serious high-water jeans neglect.
I mean, I knew it was only an illusion bodice
in college, I got the whole pencil point, clutched a codpiece
and got a job, munching a baguette bag, pure messenger geek.
And I felt for: the hobo, circling skirt and heroin chic.
They’ll bury me in a coffin dress, ma
when I can no longer reach my shelf bra;
but yet may I haunt in shift and sheath,
the deep discounts of the underneath.

 

Parable Of The Rehearsal

The director said meanwhile let’s take it from the top of your breastbone and Charissa who was in love with Stavia imagined touching her breastbone to breastbone and between lips with the very tip of her salty tongue and Philp shook off his gig economy position as a financial advisor to the ruinous few and tried to let the poetry hiss between his teeth like the squirrel he’d passed in the green parkway and Robyn had skipped her 5K again so her lungs were stiff as leather bellow and Glen and Ben had a fight that morning which was about nothing in the way that breathing is nothing and Marcelle ignored the injunction because she was casually considering being done with breath now and forever and David drew from his deep well of narcissism that began in his satiated belly and Belle commenced hiccups and wondered if this was part of a pre-condition of shallowness or the well source of all charm and Russ licked her lips with satisfaction as she imagined arranging them on that big dick of Steph and Thor thought of how much they hated breathing as exercise and Julie’s head was as empty as the part in script that said breathe and Devon held his and Maggie expelled hers and the air was rife with molecules that carried both poisons and information and the director said ok now let it go completely out your toes and wondered how his life had come to be doing only what he loved for as long as anyone loved it and was it all just a preparation and the answer was yes and the answer was yes and the answer was yes

Fire Season

Two thirds of my state is on fire
while I’m at the Tualatin Country Club
at the birthday of a survivor
his dumb luck

to have been spared
as he sits surrounded by Jews
once barred elsewhere but now
only sprinklers may hiss as they enter.

Then I kiss his cheek
still pink ninety-nine summers,
he whispers: you and I have business later
flirty words from a man who knew

death in the biblical sense
where they ate candles
cut into splinters
dreamt the conflagration of one more year

parched with wonder
regarding what destruction is natural or unnatural
while the waiter bends to ask about water
& I whisper thank you I am the fire.

I Discover that Trees Breathe

I Discover that Trees Breathe by Merridawn Duckler

the winds hush, boughs lower
leaf laden heavy with fiber,
the mirror of centrosome
drowsed by night
even as owls alert and long-eyed
fill the crook, seed dreams
arise in shadow
our footfall soft, talk quieted.
like children asleep
we are what wakens them

Ways in which I Wasted my Youth

https://hamiltonstone.org/hsr46%20poetry.html#duckler

Into the mail chute outside a hospital wait room,

I slid metal plackets to be read from the X-ray lab,

the pay pretty great, though I’d be leaving soon

for college, beside me was a trained tech, a real loutish lad

and a receptionist with plucked brows and a red mouth

he and everyone flirted with, though she had a steady

and confided how at her second job at a drive thru photo booth,

she let him rob her two times while cute security

guards took her statement, always asking for her home phone,

and when she was hungover, she’d have me put the sensors to rest

on the old guys wheeled in for an EKG, scared and prone,

and me an unschooled seventeen, dabbed those cold breasts

and swore that if I lived to sixty (which was in doubt) I’d rather die

than live my whole life on a fat paycheck, in a lab, with a lie.

Why They Revere the Alcoholic Neighbor

https://plumepoetry.com/author/duckler-merridawn/

 

I killed a deer
You killed a deer?
My one time hunting
What made you think of it
That truck over there is like my old neighbors
I see
He took me hunting in it
Why
For meat
Sitting in one of those blinds
No, he shot it from his truck window
That is so illegal.
That’s what I said
What was his answer
Only if you’re caught
So there you two are driving along
We see this deer
He stops the car
He reaches pulls the rifle under his seat and fires
He shot a deer out an open window?
Actually it shattered
Jesus, then what
We went and dragged up the body and put it in the truck
You went along with this
Pretty incredible one-handed, from a moving truck, single shot to the forehead
Was he drunk.
I don’t know, I never saw him sober
Why were you there
I was twelve
No greater reverence than a child for the alcoholic neighbor
That was the only time I hunted
But what did you think.
I thought, wow, you can do that, you can do that in this world.

Gonzalez-Torres at the Solstice

https://plumepoetry.com/author/duckler-merridawn/

Everyone guzzled what light there was leftover,
filled Big Gulps, jars with screw tops (optimists)
guy in front of me with makeshift dozer
attached to his car grill, stacked the light promise
in piles against a rainy day. A forked
blue caldera in the otherwise ashen sky
tormented us with reminded concord
as it sucked up daylight and my rebel eyes
shut tightly against the dark, my logo
made veins that ran parallel like lightening stock
footage and the time I saw the photo
of two clocks, made to never and definitely stop
Perfect Lovers. Grasp them, my bireme
and believe in days short as a prescient dream.

Ode to Small Towns

https://scoundreltime.com/ode-to-small-towns/

Though none of you share my political convictions I will allow you a small amount of joy.
My window is lit in solidarity with any other window that chooses to be awake this midnight.
There is no other lit window that I can tell but then my vision cannot see over the next rise.
Along the hiking trail some of you taunted me with the old it’s right over the next rise thing.
You sat on your stool, middle of the trail, for you have known your whole life where it ends.
Up at the lake the trees conspired to bring oxygen to us, though they knew it spelt possible doom.
Smoke-colored fir lay in a puzzle of uprooted-ness and one grew around the wound of the other.
In the parade were Harleys, a flag honor guard, someone running for mayor, an ATV, a dog.
Went two blocks and then doubled back, though the dog could have gone a few more rounds
And we uncovered our heads though to my foreign people the opposite is a sign of respect.
That night, on my knees, praying for education, I looked up and saw another window lit.
My family disapproves of my hokey romance of the small town, finds it a load of crap.
So it may have been mere accident, the drug-addled, a nursing mother, a trick, or a most northern star.

Arrangements

https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/arrangements

 

There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist. I had no “experience” but who becomes a professional flower deliverer? Although deconstructing Dutch still life flowers had been an assignment in my MFA from our teacher who looked like a monk and drank like one too.

In that era, there were maps. Even to this day I can refold a map with authority, though I couldn’t have predicted how useless a skill set that would become. The shop was large, cold and empty, awaiting Valentine’s Day, June weddings and death. In the back room leaves lay scattered all over the concrete floor, like a destructive baby had trawled a garden.

Doris the owner worked at a long metal table back there, between big white plastic tubs of fisted ferns and damp babies’ breath. Doris was short, tough, with three piercings in one ear and  none in the other. Her head was outsized, like a warthog’s, under a bandy-legged sailor’s body. She near slapped the teleflora sanctioned bouquets into shape, loudly addressing the silent, tall, sandy-haired man next to her covering Styrofoam orbs in gold spray paint. That was her husband. He was like a sous chef for flowers. She always made the same joke, that I should be the one to spray the orbs since I was an artist. She found that a most hilarious profession.

Everyone smoked, while they listened to barely audible top forty and expertly jabbed stems into the pin, frog or foam. They’d put a card in the forked pick, ribbon up the cellophane nice and tight, and load everything into the back of my Dodge. One day there was an identical Doris waiting outside the shop when I arrived. Also smoking. Also wearing a stained sweatshirt with the arms cut off.

She left and I stood there as Doris attached a huge funeral spray to a wooden stand that looked like an easel. “My sister,” she said, by way of explanation. She stood with her hands on her hips, checking the symmetry of the carnations that formed a cross. “You know what she was, right?” she put down her cigarette and slicked her finger over a drooping rose. “Anyone can tell, right?” Her husband worked silently. “A nun! What a cliché. And now she quit and what the hell is she qualified for now?”

They let me go a few weeks later so I guess that was the answer. Odd jobs. That’s the old term for them. And yet the memory comes back so powerfully, barreling down the highway, smoke clinging to my hair, surrounded by flowers, as if I was traveling everywhere in a field that moved.

Intern

https://www.friggmagazine.com/issuefiftythree/fiction/duckler/intern.htm

The intern is an enigma. Of course we knew that from the training. But the actual arrival is different.

I asked Abbott.

“Where does the intern sit?”

“Floating.”

“The position isn’t floating, it’s fixed.”

“That’s not what Kendall says.”

“Kendall is an asshole.”

“Is that what you’re going to tell the intern on their first day, that Kendall is an asshole?”

“It’s good intel,” I said. If I was an intern, I’d appreciate knowing it.

The intern came to the meeting with a pad and pen. No one knew what that was about. Maybe it only appeared to be a pen. From a hotel room. Appeared to be paper. We sent Montgomery to ask. Montgomery is the lowest link. They walked up and down the hall, talking.

I waited, around the corner.

“What did he say, Montgomery?”

“Who?”

“The intern. About the paper.”

“I’m pretty sure the intern is a girl.”

“What do you mean, pretty sure?”

“The intern is a girl.”

“So paper, pens, is a girl thing?”

Gibiet-Nomack walked by and snorted.

Our company thrives on information. Information is better than gold or food. People followed the intern, spiritually, physically, medially. Some wanted to know if the intern was going to Burning Man.

Or I did.

“No.”

“Then, where? Where is the intern going? Not that I care. But for the encrypted newsletter.”

“Loma Linda.”

“What the hell?”

“Largest population of Seventh Day Adventists in the world.”

I went to see Bergman.

“Montgomery isn’t becoming a thing now, is he? We should never have sent him to talk to the intern.”

Since the intern has no salary, I wonder how they live. I dream a dream where the intern sleeps in two ergonomic chairs. Later, I dream I float past the intern, sitting on an empty stoop, eating huge spoonfuls of garbage. I wake up weeping, a thing I used to do as a child. At work I corner Abbott.

“What have you seen them eat?”

“Who eat?”

“Don’t be a jerk.” I tell Abbott the dream. I learned long ago that only by being completely honest can I avoid producing the shame that attracts bullies.

“Seriously? I think that intern eats very expensive, vegan food most days.”

“Why would food stripped of elements be more expensive when philosophies of negative capability suggests it should be less?”

“That’s like asking why a muscle shirt isn’t cheaper than one with sleeves.”

According to office legend, this is how we two landed the Hamilton account and paved the way for the IPO.

People say they are over the intern. It’s crap. No one gets over the intern. Not on my watch.

The way the intern climbs stairs. The way the intern washes a broken pair of sunglasses. The way the intern dresses in snow. The scent of the intern, leaving the executive suite. How the intern has affected us. How the days before the intern wink and fade, then return in the morning, like stars.

I am in line getting coffee and when I look up from my phone, I am face to face with the intern. How many days and nights this moment brings to mind? Of course I am speechless but, it turns out, the intern is not. The intern is super chatty. On and on. The line is getting held up. The intern is fatuous, inventive, and quite mean-spirited. Finally, I break in. I have to do it, because only by being completely honest, etc.

“Intern …”

“Oh, I’m not an intern anymore. I got hired.”

I buy the intern’s … former intern’s … coffee. They slyly change their order to include more espresso than an Italian revolutionary congress. At that moment a whole dimension in me opens that creates the safe space for bullies to live. Petals of the flower part. I take the first step on the thousand-fold journey.

Bank Robber School

Bank Robber School ~ fiction by Merridawn Duckler

Robbing is hard, but bank robbing school is harder. That’s because the difference between learning and doing is the difference between the rigid spin on the weather vane and a tree full of branches bent by wind. Over one hundred wanna be robbers started with our class and now it’s down to the top three: me, Willie, and Samantha.  Traditionally, there has never been more than two and even that raises eyebrows from the old timers. Tradition, discipline and timing are gold standard school values that have been drilled into us from day one.

My dad ran a small grocery. He handled money well, had fast reflexes and even when Pine Street flooded, he had the discipline to go to work. He died of  a heart attack at age forty-five, leaving me the bread-winner. So, that’s my story. Willie is as ambitious as he is lazy. He seems to think his name alone will ensure his place (and yes, he is related to that Willie) as if names were just announced their contents. He’d say, “Alan, hmmm. Now there’s a bank robber name!” Samantha surprised everyone because no girl has gotten to finals before. But I doubt she surprised herself. She knows her skills, accepts them like gifts they are. And, yes, works harder than a dozen dudes. I am in love with her, though I judge my chances as hovering around eight percent, with a three percent margin of error. We learn this in bank robbing school—life is composed of percentages and margins. To get here we had to be good at math, in top physical condition, whip smart and deeply imaginative. That imagination module alone knocked out about half the class. Money grubbers fall off in that first-year final like a herd of sheep on a cliff.

Willie claims you also have to be “devastatingly handsome.” He enjoys teasing me about that since I am a little insecure.  Still, my black tee is logo-free (harder to identify) and my sneakers are pristine. I know very well I look like someone who belongs in white-collar. But sitting in front of a screen, scamming old people? Where is the romance, the skill, the tradition in that? That’s for types like Brooks.  He hasn’t even graduated but already cornered his first million. The school likes to trot him out, like some prize pony. I’m aware he’s got his sights set on Samantha. He seems to think if a white-collar married a robber, they could rule the world. But who would want to live in that world? That’s my question.

Last night the three of us moved into the Hotel Across the Street. They had to scramble to get a room for Samantha because there were no female accommodations.  The sight of her, standing there with her beat up leather saddle bags, her thick black, hair in a neat rope of a braid took my breath away. She’s as beautiful as a painting and as complicated as a lock. She doesn’t talk a lot, but if you’ve ever had the great good fortune to hear her laugh, your heart would be a quivering chalice of jelly. Willie tried to pick up one of her bags and next thing you know he was face planted. Yes, she has a black belt. He sat there, grinning. Then all shenanigans were put aside as we advanced to practicum before the real thing.

Like everyone I had been in First National many times. All students are required to do a minimum of two units of Simulation posing as tellers, regular people trying to make a deposit, guards. They do mess with you. I remember someone in my freshman class was handed a baby and a service dog. They appeared to be toast but everyone who didn’t help them were the ones who got docked. That was the actual test (which I had figured out) because bank robbing requires loyalty and a tight crew. Willie, Samantha and me understood that from day one. Whatever our personal issues, we put them aside for the greater good. We would practice at night, long after the others had shut their books, or were out on the town partying. The three of us learned to react like one person.

There’s a lot of pomp and circumstance at the simulated First National like touching the bank seal (Willie, that idiot, gave it a high five) and taking the fewest possible steps to the counter. But I was so concentrated on my moves that I hardy remember a thing. Crouching with Samantha under the counter, it was strangely calm, even peaceful. I almost blurted out my love but thank god training took over. Still, it was an incredible feeling. If you think “thief heart” is not a thing, you know nothing about the high of bank robbing.

But as we ran around the corner with our pretend loot, there stood Brooks. Was he a plant by the administration? Or was he acting on his own? I looked to Willie for help, but he played it cool. “Come to watch the masters at work?” he said, securing our take in a cardboard box marked as medical waste (Samantha’s touch) and tossing the keys at me.

“Nice getaway,” he sneered at me. “I’d certainly want to get away from it.”

“It’s called a drive-away, Brooks,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “And if it was a nice car, why would we just leave it?”

“Don’t give him the time of day,” said Willie. “He doesn’t even have a license. Never gonna take us girls for a spin on a moonlit night.”

Brook’s face turned bright red.

“Catch you on the flip side, shrimp. Oh wait, there is no flip side. Because what idiot robs a physical bank anymore when all the real money is in manipulated markets via AI. They gonna to throw an AI in jail? I doubt it.”

Samantha slammed the trunk and started to get in the car.

“As for you, sweetheart, who do you think is going down in finals—the one who represents tradition or the one who represents change? They’re going to make an example of you and save themselves the trouble of adding another bathroom. You’ll look great walking away in cuffs and the patriarchy will live to rule another day.”

Samantha took another step closer.

“You’re making it about heroics and emotions, which is typical of a girl. For real men, it’s all about the take. Just don’t forget that, as you rot away in jail without your…” and he made a cutting motion, as if he was cutting off a braid.

She sprang and Willie caught her. “It’s not worth it,” he said, “It’s a trap.” She wriggled in his arms and all I could think about was: damn, why didn’t I catch her? If the whole point of Brook’s appearance was to shake us up, it was really working.

That night none of us slept a wink. I thought about a lot of things. My first days as a freshman, a geek no one would deign to even sit next to at the luncheonette. And the day I came up with the plan and Willie strolling around the corner, pulling the roller bag with Samantha in it. The look on the council faces was something I’ll never forget.

Then, in a rush, there we were in front of a real bank. This was no practicum. Our teachers weren’t there to help us now. It was our bank to rob.

Everything went like a dream. I had never felt so graceful. Willie was as quick as lightning and he even shut up, for once. Samantha looked like a queen, eyes shining under the mask. There was a heart stopping moment when the roll looked like it wasn’t going to tumble but when we heard that click we resisted cheering like amateurs and just gave a hand sign we had worked out at the beginning of the year. The thick door swung open. And for a moment, I thought wow, who put a mirror in here? But it was just shining, empty walls. The gleaming walls of an entirely cleaned out vault.

I felt myself turning in slow-motion; I might even have screamed. I saw the guard (where on earth did she come from?) advancing on Willie, gun drawn. I watched Willie watch a stream of red run through his fingers. It didn’t make any sense—I never even heard the shot. He stumbled, looked at me, I threw the keys and he ran. But it all came at a cost, because while my back was turned there was Samantha’s limp body being dragged away as guards poured in from every side.

That’s when I grabbed you. I’m sorry you got pulled into all this, but we never know what life will hand us. Here we sit, while newscasters mill around outside, ironically enough right here on Pine Street where my dad fought his way through flooded streets to get to work. Want to hear an even greater irony? The one class I almost failed was Notes. Mine were deemed too short and confusing. Some were missing essential elements like the actual instructions of what to put in the bag. But I want you to know I’m wrote this one with all my heart, everything here is true. I want you to know somewhere, somehow Willie will find a clinic that doesn’t ask too many questions. Samantha can crawl her way out of anywhere. They are survivors. Maybe Brook will get his, maybe he will not. As for me, I chose this life when I took that first step, my first day.  I abhor all violence. I will never give up on my dreams.


 

Based on the Super Annoying Prompt

https://medium.com/emrys-journal-online/emrys-journal-online-issue-1-4-5833c956fed7

Someone has written Sarah on the porch

on the back of this handed over photograph,

for me to work on.

Who the hell is Sarah?

Why is she on the porch?

In this eighties outfit, a tube top!

That’s why my mind goes to Elie Tahari, who everyone thinks is a woman

but is actually an Iranian guy.

He came to New York City, walked the streets

of his adopted home, hot and dirty, beautiful and remote.

There were a thousand like him but maybe none

from an orphanage in Rishon L’Zion, founded by Russian immigrants,

escaping pogrom, in the time before

an even worse thing than pogrom

is coming.

He kicks off to America with less than a hundred damp American dollars,

burning designer holes in his pockets.

Rishon was hot and dirty but not like this dirt! American dirt! Where anyone

can grow a pair, in the rich, uncaring and abundant nutrients of the new world.

He takes in the local sounds: screams of joy of those making it!

In the disco he side eyes side boobs squished into basically a bandanna

and thinks, that’s the pair.

Then the prompt starts making me do this and that,

bossy and directive,

competitive and snippy, similar to the New York Elie saw,

filled first with hope and then blood of his ex-wife. No, not because she

scratched his eyes out — they loved each other — but because he believed love had cured his diabetes

and then had to go into the hospital because love

does not cure diabetes.

Nor can it be prompted.

Nor can you predict when it will fall into your hands.

I Made Myself Sick Reading Frank O’Hara

https://www.dmqreview.com/duckler-winter-2018

Ugh, I just made myself sick reading Frank O’Hara.
Not just one or two but a whole box of them.
Why did I do that?!
I have no self-control.
Beautiful birds swim peacefully
in the icy river, rounds of dark glitter.
While I drag like a blub of butter, French and fragrant,
writing letters in my trembly Cy Twombly.

Winter is just tights to me! Damned stuffed sausage.
Then the river got scored
by Rachmaninoff, fat geese flew across the snow lot
glissando, then a red fire truck vanished.
OK, one more.
Help me, Frankie, stop thinking like a hot body.
Seek dreamboats on the cover, hip-in-boots, channel
deep the semi-legal, not imaginary, flesh.
So, so over-rated. I mean my clothes. Not love.

Hebo, Oregon

http://juked.com/2018/09/merridawn-duckler-hebo-oregon.asp

First you dreamed you cut my hair

then made me watch some video of a Russian

cutting a woman’s hair with an axe—

so, what exactly are you trying to tell me?

 

And when I looked up what does it mean

to dream of cutting someone’s hair

there were only dumb-ass ideas about loss of power

and a lazy conflating with Delilah,

 

furthermore, these interpretations were for dreams

where a person cuts their own hair

which I have heard used as a metaphor

regarding why we writers need an editor,

 

or it’s like cutting your own hair—

though in dreams, the editor sleeps.

On this topic, I brooded, and nothing satisfied me

because I was awake while others dreamt.

 

And in my insomnia, I turned to read up about Hebo, Oregon

population 213, most with a HS degree or higher,

widely white, some mixed, not poor, not rich except in sunsets,

median age is 73.4, which makes us all young and only 23.9%

 

feel bad about themselves says the website

I’m reading all this information from

(who the hell compiles these things!)

most skew straight and in Hebo lives a single sex offender

 

who cries at night, where others see his light on;

I made that one up but not the fact that

gums are mostly healthy here, elevation is 77 feet

the commonest names are George and Helen,

 

sleep averages 6.8 hours and with each sunrise

comes the promise of a new day; news is brief and terse

from Happy Hollow and almost the same number (89.4%)

are married as don’t go to any damn church

 

since they see god daily in the fields and hollows,

the wind over the fields like a great hand;

very few come from anywhere and fewer still want to leave.

business is mainly retail and none of yours.

 

And you might ask what am I to Hebo? Or he to me

(if cities are men) my own sister doesn’t know

why we were born here, in Oregon, it seems the oddest place

for broody, over-intellectualized Jews

 

stateless Livaks who fled Mother Russia,

(a nation that’s for sure a woman)

where they show the videos of successful axe

hair stylists but keep the unsuccessful ones

 

in a government vault. Why end up here

we who average 3.2 sleepless hours a night

over what dreams really mean?

So, sis packed off to a pied-à-terre in NYC

 

while you and I fly through Hebo

until I said stop and what was that

and we did stop, since I was the driver and backed up

to a dusty drive where 73.4-year-olds walk

 

purposefully out in full sun to get the mail,

we rolled all the way back, looking this way and that

because I’d seen a farm stand

inside the open gate of a brown old barn

 

with an ox red door where wild flowers, foxglove, tassel rue

and black-eyed Susan bloomed in the bed

of a Radio Flyer, next to a gold wicker chair

with a white embroidered pillow as a seat

 

and a table with cloth of blue and purple pears

holding a porcelain metal tub, the kind with an ink black rim,

full of more flowers such as common yarrow

deep pink farewell-to-spring and neon green hairy manzanita

 

all beside a wind and rain weathered

metal shed and a dangling sign that said Pie

said Fruit said Summer said No Childhood but this One

Keep Dogs in Vehicle because heaven needs dogs and cars intact.

 

We got out of our dog-less car in a dream

of Hebo, off highway twenty-something,

I didn’t have all the statistics at hand then

but could tell we had brought the population to 215

 

and the Jewish population to 2. Sure, we wanted pie

but so much more was at stake. Inside the barn a delicious

coolness prevailed and pay was on the honor system

a system broken down in the rest of the country then

 

but as alive in Hebo, as you and I, staggering under the beauty

of a brown barn on a country road, in sunlight, before fields

of such green and living grasses as our sleep is composed of

when we are in the dream of metaphor,

 

where we have mind-built a world, as Auden says, “exactly to our liking.”

On the table were baskets of berries, some black as a bear eye

others red as his maw. There were green cartons of beans

and salmon that had a day before been swimming in blunt

 

survival and would survive, on our tongues. Behind the table

stood a woman who looked like a woman, curved as nature

with a round, open, smiling face and I had to tease her,

saying: I am only here to monitor the pie purchases

 

which made her laugh, because yes, that is a woman’s job

and I would have said anything to make her laugh again.

She had on a pretty top and a prettier skirt, even though no one

goes to church in Hebo; yet the church comes to them, Sunday

 

at the farm stand, in a revelation of first fruits.

You gazed hungrily at pies in which the calorie count

was high, but then again so was the love.

And we wanted to buy everything: the yarrow,

 

the berries, the tracks where a dog lay

outside the car, the old baler leaned onto wood,

the blouse of the woman

her laugh, which was a full body itself, her eye shine

 

the empty pews in her, the honor system, the wind

that waved the foxglove in stately nods

as if we had all the money in the world

as if our median income was infinite as stars.

 

Now you think I will return to that hair

since all illogic is circular

and don’t worry I am going to

but the beauty of that farm stand had not cleared in me like a check

 

but bounced along with us for miles. I took

and posted a picture but inside me was another picture

in berry-stained voice, that showed we do belong here, sister,

because we are all strangers, all of us emigre

 

to Oregon as Montaigne said of some monks “they are in the world

but not of it” I don’t even know if it was Montaigne,

but it sounds like him, all of us temporary on the land

of peoples who deeply understood no ownership survives

 

only fields feed, winds nourish,

nature kills, revives and dissipates and returns,

I take everything for granted at the same time I know it will vanish

on that valance, I stake my life, on the analyzable dream.

 

Before sleep, moments run through my fingers like grain in a silo

and I keep Hebo running in the background,

which takes up a great deal of power

And sister, who is city as they come

 

represents berries in my half-dream of her red-vamped heels,

in her jewels, which are actually her eyes

(don’t tell her that) and the pert snap of her words

that bring a delicious coolness to our fevered romance

 

gallerist, moralist, bleak Jewish beauty

of the diaspora, which means to scatter seeds

who is a much more careful driver

and secret chronicler of all original twinship

 

Not one to stop in a spray of gravel

on the empty, suspicious roads here or ever

yet stands in ruined dreams beside my memory of the farm stand

everyone hopes will be attended by good Christian folk

 

but instead get crashed by tossed Jews who read

http://www.city-data.com/city/Hebo-Oregon.html

rolling under night covers, saying, love, I am

trying to understand the world’s deadly beautification,

 

so that I might stop rolling this open road

and sleep, which sis said takes out the day’s garbage

but in motes reveals the single near-invisible strand

against the inevitable and most final timbre of the axe.

Parable of the Family

http://www.ucityreview.com/16_Duckler_Merridawn.html

Cry me a river
And build a bridge
Over it and then burn
That bridge, then text the
Bridge Bureau and complain
That the bridge is out then drink up
An ocean and pick your teeth with a Douglas
Fir then fan your fanny with those wind turbines
That freak us all out in what used to be open horizons
Of Utah-Montana where we freely played sending optimistic
Messages by extant Passenger pigeon, whirled their feathers in
Up dried creeks under skies so beautiful blue vast and numerous and
Besieged we feared we don’t deserve them only to trudge back to your snarl
That was once a brave ass smile but is now gimlet-eyed, daiquiri-eyed and we enter
With two broken tablets, throw down, your power vanquished, and no one misses it more than us.

In a Thrift Shop in Denver

https://cactifur.com/2018/06/

 

In a Thrift Shop in Denver

 

An old guy walked by, farting in a thrift shop in Denver.

I missed my father, so I started to follow him.

What people give away! Srsly. Bobble-less heads, rejected ornaments,

a blanket with a hole chewed in it.

 

Meanwhile that guy pppffst out what the Greeks thought

Was how gods spoke to us with each step.

All morning I’d been stuck in a group reading the bible

One woman wore a laminated thing around her neck that said:

 

Please Speak Clearly! I kid you not.

I wanted one that said Warning: I’m An Asshole!

for that one autodidact, grinding his rancid opinions in

a Tupperware. The baby Rabbi whispered: God responds to our tears.

 

A young, anguished fellow replied: My father told me not to cry

at bullies, it eggs them on, his voice choked. But then Dad said: OK, cry.

Outside clouds over the Rockies, gray, pink and radiant, gather sky corners like the hem

of a robe, over the unknowable cleft on that farting guy in the Arc Thrift.

 

Letter to James Luna

“Letter to James Luna”

Letter to James Luna

(in memoriam, d. March 4, 2018)

Dear James Mister Luna, dear James you don’t maybe remember me? We met at Black the gallery. I wrote the grant to bring you. I am a member there. Your talk lecture talk lecture was inspiring goddamn. I won’t forget it. I can’t forget it. Forget it.  I am not Indian, native, first American. No repraitions  repairations retarains nothing is possible to forget about it. I liked best when that time you said you were the most most photographed Indian native first American on the planet. People took your picture at your invitation request. Your great joke. But I wondered then and now is this about stealing the soul thing? Idea of stealing the soul with a photograph. How the soul is stolen by a photograph. The soul and photograph thing. Endless stubborn wish to photograph you and how you turned that around and owned. And you owned the impulse. My impulse to thank you for this insight. In sight. Insight. Vision. Vision. Question. Quest. Quest. I had this question I wanted to ask, do you think this idea that the soul is stolen by taking a photograph. I mean some of these people on facebook and their children are doomed, if so.  Is true. Since we stole stold s’told robbed everything else?  Yet that idea was right. It preserved destroyed your people. I wonder. You opened my eyes to that. Might take me while to send this letter. I plan to send this letter right away. I figure I have time to get it right. I mean my gratitude that you came. And spoke. What you said. My mind’s a jumbled mess. So much clarity in your way of speaking. I don’t even have a picture. Idiotic assertion I know. I kinda wanted something to remember the moment. If you answer, I will.

Ever, always

M.

 

My Contribution

Riddled with Arrows Issue 2.1

What humans brought into the world is exaggeration: for example
that day we shuffled into the bleak auditorium, me baby-faced
with a haughty and yearning heart; young, brainy, stiff-necked
and all around me, rubberneckers looked for him and there he was,
at the podium, face like a potato, portly;
hands that could fist the throat of a fish,
famously unsmiling, a dense mountain from Montana
come to us, idiots of the west.

This man is my lover I wanted to announce; like so many others
he just doesn’t know it yet. But he opened the book
as I had my own eyes, a thousand times,
in light and dark. And he began to read
with the authority of a conductor taking me to the stops,
and shelters. Until now no one had ever used
the second person on me.

The last good kiss, he said, /you had was years ago. I seized my seat
handle, melted into the chair, my hair was in pleads, my toes
griped the slope of the raked stairs,
that ghost kiss came to haunt me,
my whole life, even as I stand and make like to throw this chair
at the window and, as the glass breaks, I cry: take that, Time.

Samsara

http://www.ninthletter.com/winter-2018/winter-2018-poetry/249-duckler

 

The homeless guy lives in my neighborhood, which is the world.
He never considers the lilies of the field because that cart has to be pushed uphill.

Or maybe he does consider; I don’t know for we never speak.
A deaf semiotic, “the homeless,” with its echoes of holes and hopelessness.

I am afraid to disturb them as much as they disturb me.
I am terrified of what would happen to me, if they disappeared;

never seeing their hiding places, the underpass concave filled
with heaped cloth and broken mechanicals, never feeling parasitic

or extremely lucky. Never having the surface broken in me.
I do not deserve the homeless, none of us do. Give them homes,

that invisible place we try to return the rest of our lives,
holding lilies cut at the stem, to give the illusion of life in flat water.

Every time I pass and don’t offer my mouth as a prayer
let me be a payer. The scholar told me say shoah instead of holocaust 

because they are not your burnt offering but a catastrophe,
which is such a noble lie.

 

The Frank Stella Irrespective

https://www.jetfuelreview.com/uploads/5/9/9/4/59942345/issue_14.pdf

 

“Do you still call these things paintings?”
“Yes, they are, in fact, paintings.”

I am not your window.
I am your door painter.

I am your poor, yearning to be me.
Take off the audio-guide and step on it.

I pick colors that follow the race circuit.
My biography is cartography.

I am straight from the can.
My Jewish gates are closed open to you.

I will destroy the old villages with a protractor.
I found the object that you lost in Russia in 1933.

I married a birder.
Yes, she was, in fact, a passionate birder.

I wept in jail from an anecdote that made others laugh.
See how the picture plane gives it both ways?

I am not a mirror.
I am your mirror.

I kept one hand on the wall, it was hard to give it up.
I have changed everything with a tiny cut.

Most of all, the painting is an argument.
and I am the one who has to be convinced.

Survivor

https://www.jetfuelreview.com/uploads/5/9/9/4/59942345/issue_14.pdf

The philanderer and the harlot gave you the world’s tiniest violin
to play at their multiple weddings. They are your parents.

Across town your sister sits in a flower dress,
only long enough to cover her sadness.

You sing as you play: O, persistent shame, come hither;
ever the second child, they had to throw out the first

not like a baseball or a bouquet but like a miscarriage
spinning in history’s pale, porcelain bowl.

I see you have grown your hair long as a willow.
You are beautiful and wise. When the whispers begin

you never stop cooking
but follow the recipe by heart

so your ears are free to catch even one fact before it’s doused
quick as a firefly, to bring at night to your sister

hidden in the silo. There she sits, a shy ram on the sidelines,
as they go through the grand motions of laying the greater good on the pyre.

The Night Wolves Of Russia

The Night Wolves of Russia

are brando-like, bandit-like
Russian bikers,
reported on the radio
but I have to cut off the idiot
driving in front of me so I miss the gist
of their complaint
concerning Ukraine, which a Russian taught me
never to call the Ukraine,
as if it was a border he sneered
with his remarkably wolf-like teeth, and pale skull
perfect for hanging over a fireplace.
“Never!” he shouted
in the loud bar named
after a U2 album
where, since it was impossible to sleep
but easy to drink
we spent each night;
a dump where first a guy grabbed my butt
and then a girl grabbed my butt, so I was well supported.
By now the radio show had moved on
and I lost the night wolves,
though I picture them cruising
inside the vast, block long
department store in St. Petersburg
where stone-cold women prevented me
from buying amber, a red source of infinite light,
a well of tears from the chained daughters,
a fossil of resin preserved before any country had borders,
though there was never a time before wolves.

Somewhere on the Road to Nowhere

http://atlengthmag.com/tag/merridawn-duckler/

In 1969, a young former abstract expressionist decided he was done with painting, went out to the middle of nowhere, set off explosives that displaced 244,000 tons of rocks, and made two 30×50-foot trenches that contained nothing.

That artist, Michael Heizer, was not the only one to name this kind of action “art.” That same year, Dennis Oppenheim dragged a broom through the snow to make Gallery Transplant. Robert Smithson poured hot asphalt down a quarry in Rome. Agnes Denes buried poems in a rice field. Hans Haacke buried himself in a series of photos entitled, fittingly, Self-Burial. They shared a common moniker, if not entirely a common cause: they were artists who had moved out of the gallery and museum system to make what came to be known as land art.

In our hyper-contextualized world of the tagged and displayed, relying upon “nothing” and “nowhere” as aesthetic constructs seems near dead. But there was a moment in American art in the late 1960s and mid-1970s that powerfully championed ephemerality, communality, and anti-materialism. They arrived at these shared philosophies of process from varying aesthetics and professional trajectories. Heizer, for example, was the son of a famous anthropologist; his family had lived in the Nevada desert, where he created Double Negative, since the 1800s. As a child, he accompanied his father on field work which took them from centuries-old Native burial mounds to newer sites, scarred by commerce and munitions. Perhaps it was this wide-open range he was thinking of when he wrote: “The museums and collections are stuffed, the floors sagging, but the real space still exists.”1

There is plenty to rightfully critique about land art. With a few remarkable exceptions, it was an overwhelmingly male-centric enterprise, as morbidly aggressive as it was naïve about gestural nuance. I think those critiques stand even if we are attentive to the dangers of presentism, which I am. And of course, anti-materialism and capitalism often end up bedfellows: today, no one gets into Roden Crater without a hefty donation, and Dia didn’t buy Earth Room for a handful of beads. But it’s my sense that Double Negative remains in the true spirit of land art: it’s open to anyone with the resources to make the trek. So that’s what I did. I went to see Double Negative for myself.

*

What I’m most attracted to in land art is that it insists its work is not to make A Landscape, but thinks of itself as the landscape—a physical testament to the idea that one cannot own what Julian Myers calls “the dream of an elsewhere.”2 Ideally, it has no entrance fee and keeps no hours. At Double Negative, there aren’t even actual directions to guide intrepid visitors; instead there near inscrutable instructions, like “Go to the top of the mesa and turn left at the cattle guard.” No museum houses it; there’s no guard, no gift shop, no wall label, no guide. My destination would be in a space past No.

Double Negative lies at the city limits of Overton, Nevada. My husband and I wound up through the empty streets of well-maintained houses to crawl a vertiginous road, the width of a horse and the incline of a roller coaster. After a half mile, the car righted itself onto a spectacular piece of land called the Mormon Mesa.

Mesas are a characteristic landform of arid environments: weaker rocks wear away and stronger ones remain standing, creating a flat, high area that resembles a huge table.  No one lives on Mormon Mesa. There is nothing there. The view is likely unchanged in ten thousand years. Above, white canvas clouds hang in perfect mounds. Below is the entrance to 149,000 acres of slow-moving desert tortoise, quick hissing snakes, and creosote bursage scrub. It is impossibly quiet, because the wind takes every word away.

Outside the car the heat feels like a judgment, and lands everywhere. Walking on the mesa feels like walking on a moonscape. It occurs to me that I had unconsciously dressed entirely in black, as if I really was in a museum. I feel completely absurd.

*

Heizer was trained as a painter, but land art made him a sculptor. Because however revolutionary a project the land artists thought they were creating, that’s what land art is: sculpture. This isn’t so much about the physicality of sculpture—paintings are physical objects, too—but about how the fundamental painterly tools of hue and perspective are replaced by the fundamentally sculptural values of dimension and time.

The art historian Rosalind Krauss calls sculpture a medium “at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing.”3 And an interest in time was primary to the aesthetic of land art, which wanted to be at once ephemeral and epic, mythic and remote. Like sculpture, it is body-centric. In her landmark book Passages in Modern Sculpture, Krauss describes works where “the viewer’s movement as he walks around . . . endows these works with dramatic time.” Modernist painting, for example, could disavow figuration, but sculpture could never exactly disentangle itself from human form because there was always the body of the viewer, walking around it.

To get closer to the point: land art acts as a bridge between sculpture and performance art; the body of work enlists the body of the viewer. Double Negative may be just as still as a Rodin, and, as with a Rodin, I have to bring myself to it—but “bringing myself to it” is a far more dramatic enterprise, and, when I’m there, I’m an even more performative element than I would be in a museum—searching for it, walking around it, getting stinking hot.

I squint. My husband is pointing to something that looks like a landslide.

“That’s it.”

That? Really? How do you know it’s not just nature?”

“Nature doesn’t cut a hill twice to make perfect facing valleys.”

*

The first noticeable thing is that this is an art that cannot be encompassed completely. I can’t back up far enough to take it all in. The only way to see the matching trenches and their valley in its entirety would be if I was that hawk over there making lazy circles over our head. In a sense, Double Negative can’t be seen at all.

We scramble down into one of the trenches. It’s been over four decades since Heizer made this work. Now, rubble fills sections of the shallows and wind has worn away the precision. Photos can show the size and placement but not the scent and texture of the work. Not the wind, and stillness; the heat and shadow. It is experiential; I exist inside and outside the work in an extraordinary position. I expected it to be a sensation, a question, of scale and grandeur; instead, I have an odd feeling of closeness, as though, out in this vast and indifferent beauty, I’m contained at the center of one person.

That’s a strange tension: land art meant to do away with the individual ego. Heizer’s monographer Germano Celant said that land art particularly eschewed the “narcissistic protagonism of the individual” abstract expressionism, among other forms, privileged and championed.4

Heizer and some of his compatriots felt they were in pursuit of a so-called genuinely American art form that would be democratic in its materials and universal in its methods. They rejected the modernists’ cult of personality by, among other things, demoting the whole criteria of skill. Donatello brilliantly sculpted David, but anyone who could pick up some rocks could make their own jetty. If we define the artist as a mark-maker, then land art thinks that lightning, water, the sun, the forces of entropy are artists.

*

We walked around in Double Negative for at most an hour. It was wonderfully strange to have nothing to touch—or, to put it another way, to be able to touch anything I liked. I threw rocks. I kicked dirt. I closed my eyes and baked in the sun. Yet I also believe I did Double Negative wrong.

I know that sounds strange. Art is not benign; it contains multitudes that include ideas of right and wrong. What was the point? That nothing had stuck to me and I had been nowhere?

When I walk the corridors of a museum I feel the conversation of history, but most land art is one remote work with nothing else in sight: the conversation has been silenced. In some ways, as much as I’m drawn to the ideals of land art, I felt I had been walking an empty grave.

My sense of my own wrongness found a kind of an answer this year when I went to visit a different piece of land art: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. A curator at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, which owns the work, gave me advice about best ways to reach the site—the museum–non-museum distinction as well as the stricture on instruction, it turns out, are not as stark as I or land art always want it to be—and said to me, “You should stay as long as you can. Nancy meant people to engage.”

The Sun Tunnels are spectacularly durational. The longer you are in them, the more you see. To lie in the tunnels is to be informed about the frame of nature, the movement of nature and yourself, your own nature. Did Double Negative not invite this? Or did I just not recognize its invitation?

What kind of invitation lies beyond No?

Day at the Beach

https://crabcreekreview.blogspot.com/2017/05/day-at-beach-by-merridawn-duckler.html?m=1

We scrambled down in early fall to the gurgling, rock strewn river
What is that screaming sound, I said?

You said, it’s you. I put my hands on my ears
like those earmuffs sis wore an entire year when she was six.

A charming story except somebody should have stopped her
from doing whatever her beautiful blond head wanted

though I guess children are resilient
says everyone who isn’t a child. I lay down sideways and saw

a ribbon swath of purple and green, colors of fielded cabbage.
This is how I would paint this scene, if I was a painter, I cried

and the sad thing about that statement is that I am a painter, albeit
only on Sundays, when the paint stores are closed.

You held me close and said shhh, shhh. If you keep shouting like that, we have to leave.
A fisherman had cast us a dirty look and that man was surely not sunbathing

with his wife. Small, dark children stood in suits banded like bowling pins.
I looked all around and tried my mantra which is to stop

comparing what I see to something I saw previously. A younger sister gazed at me
from under transparent water. What a beautiful look! I made a leaf take a thrill ride

and we sat in the sun on the banks of Bull Run, light like honey
draped lichen, trees in wind, a dog’s rigorous discourse, the sun a blanket

slung over water cool as your hand, skippers above and tiny silver fish tossing for joy.
Then you held me on the big rock, the size of a massive therapy couch.

And I heard one song and I saw one picture.
And I felt one gratitude that had no equal because it was first in the world.

The Phlebotomist Lover

http://www.rogueagentjournal.com/issue19

 

Beautiful he said when I removed my coat
and, hey, compliments are not so frothy
that I’ll let blush slip off just because
he’s some technical person, looking to needle.

Truth, I’ve been told before my capillaries
stun as he taps and strokes
me essence startled into reds: berry, algaical, seductress;
I make daily, my bluids, my ocean, skein-held.

But brusque here press, the contact skin point
taped over, lover, out the automatic door, a roused memory
of death averted came, when I was a rude, delicious teen,
how an evil party did junk me, want to try? u have beautiful veins

Art Works

https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/art-works-by-merridawn-duckler

On the way to my studio by the river, in the very early morning, the grain trucks line up, heaped with a pale sienna load that sends the sparrows hopping and hoping. They bring wheat from eastern Oregon, grown in the rain shadow effect of the Cascade Range, to be shipped around the world. Some truck drivers are also the farmers, wearing overalls like in a children’s book. David, the building maintenance guy at my building calls them rubes and toolies; he has to go out and yell at them not to pee in the dirt while waiting to unload.

My studio sits between the train track and the Willamette River. Ships cross my window in huge black isosceles while on the other side of me are the trains, with a long mournful wail that makes a vagabond of all my intentions to work. But is mine work? What is a working artist? A plumber would never be called “a working plumber.” He’s either employed or unemployed. The farmers come, feed the grain elevators, they return to the farm as quickly as possible, before the sly city parts them from their hard earned cash. The trucks haul their goods, the ships move products across the water and the artists in my building only change the shape of shapes, add and remove colours, chase ideas and concepts making me wonder—is it work?

I am closing my eyes, imagining Tehching Hsieh. He’s a performance artist and even my hero, though we’ve never met. It may be best to never meet heroes, though I met Allen Ginsberg once and he was terrific. Tehching did a performance where he stayed outside for an entire year. Another time he punched a time clock every hour for a year, and took a video each hour he punched in.  It meant he couldn’t sleep, or do anything, for longer than an hour. He looks a little crazy in the video and it makes you feel somewhat ashamed to watch him, like those television ads they used to run of starving children and you were the one who had to turn the channel.

Tehching’s works were called “One Year Performances” because each one lasted a year. For one year he lived in a cage. Someone brought him food and emptied his feces. One year he punched the time clock. For a year, he lived outside, never going into any building. Between 1983-1984 he tied himself with a rope to another artist, Linda Montano, whom he barely knew. They ate, slept, worked, and presumably had relationships with other people. There is an iconic photograph of them walking on either side of a train track.

That year, the one of the rope performance, I gave birth to my first child. Was it work? It was effort. Was it art? I was the architect of that moment, though I was not entirely the sole creator. I love my sons more than I love art and even work, which is saying quite a bit.

And during that one year I lived in a kind of cage, because I lived in a body that was confined and I shared what went in and what went out. And for nine months and three, I counted the time each day.  I could not hide anywhere I went, my body was public information. I had tied myself willingly to someone I hardly knew.  After the One Year performances, Tehching spent a year making art he never showed anyone and then he stopped making art at all (or so he said—that’s what Marcel Duchamp said, and we know how that turned out.)

In the studio, it’s back to work. Tehching, Tehching! The dirty trucks come to life with a roar, ships churn up the white river water and the trains have vanished, the red barrier raised. All work is transitory and invisible, the products out in the world and what is between them runs on parallel tracks, awaiting the train.

Everything I Can’t Have in Luxe, Pacific Northwest Magazine of Interiors+Design, Spring 2016

https://reallysystem.org/issues/eleven/everything_i_can_t_have_in_luxe/

that backless dress
kitchen set
red metal dangerous door handle
Plexiglas staircase
unite my fear of heights and Plexiglas
half-filled bookcase grass strip on the kitchen island,
like pubes waxed
legs fruit floor poetic wtf stop

apparently bird wings roasting
sliced open fig
face like a tragic little extinct leopard
and a catamaran catamaran catamaran
I have not brought my room to life
I have no bathtub in the garage I have no garage
I have not realized my vision my oasis is not urban
this faucet head not this faucet head
as we are dragged toward the camps
and everything we owned is shot

Program Synopsis for the Australian Carmen

“Program Synopsis for the Australian Carmen,” by Merridawn Duckler

News Item: West Australia Opera company is removing George Bizet’s masterpiece “Carmen” from its repertoire because of a partnership with Healthway, the state government health promotion agency, which objects to the opera since it features smoking.

Act 1

A square in Seville. On the right, a tofu factory. On the left, a guardhouse.

A group of soldiers relax in the square, waiting for the changing of the guard and commenting on the passers-by (“Sur la place, chacun passe” “That One is Definitely Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). Micaëla appears, seeking José. Moralès invites her to wait with them. She declines, saying she will return. José arrives with the new guard, followed by a crowd of D.A.R.E tee shirt wearing youths. As the factory bell rings, the tofu girls emerge and exchange age-appropriate banter with young men in the crowd (“La cloche a sonné” “Come Hither, You Lactose-Intolerant Boys”). Carmen enters and sings on the untameable nature of love (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” “No Birds Were Harmed in the Singing of This Aria”). The men plead with her to choose one of them for a committed, monogamous relationship, and she throws a flower to Don José.

The women go back to the factory, Micaëla returns and gives José a letter (“Parle-moi de ma mère!” “Here’s the Name of an Analyst Who Can Help You with This Mother Issue”). He reads that his mother wants him to return home and marry Micaëla. Just as José declares that he is ready to heed his mother’s wishes, the women stream from the factory in their running shoes and sports bra. Zuniga, the officer of the guard, learns that Carmen has attacked a woman with a court order. When challenged, Carmen answers with mocking defiance (“Tra la la… Coupe-moi, brûle-moi” “Lean in This, Bitch”); Zuniga orders José to braid her hair while he prepares the prison warrant. Left alone with José, Carmen gets a safe buddy to beguile him with a seguidilla, in which she sings of a night of dancing and soft drinks with her lover in Lillas Pastia’s Starbucks. Confused yet mesmerized, José agrees; as she is led away she pushes her escort into the friend zone and runs off laughing. José is arrested for dereliction of duty.

Act 2

Lillas Pastia’s Starbucks

Carmen and her friends Frasquita and Mercédès are entertaining Zuniga and other officers (“Les tringles des sistres tintaient” “We Are STILL Waiting for A Table”) Outside, a chorus and procession announces the arrival of the no-kill animal shelter CEO. Escamillo (“Vivat, vivat le Toréro””Go SeaHawks!!!!”). Invited inside, he introduces himself with the “Toreador Song” (“Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre” “My Name is Prince “the better hide your daughters song””) and sets his sights on Carmen.

The smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado arrive and reveal their plans to dispose of some recently acquired goods (“Nous avons en tête une affaire” “SUPERSALE ON NEVER WORN AUTHENIC CHANNEL”). Frasquita and Mercédès are keen to help them, but Carmen refuses, since she wishes for equal time, equal pay. José arrives and Carmen treats him to a lap dance (“Je vais danser en votre honneur … La la la” “The Aerobic Pole Dance Class Song”) and is joined by a distant bugle call from the barracks. When José says he must return to duty, she mocks him, and he shows her the flower that she threw to him in the square (“La fleur que tu m’avais jetée” “Drought Resistant Crop Covers”). Unconvinced, Carmen demands he shows his love by putting a ring on it. As Jose prepares to depart, Zuniga enters looking for Carmen. He and José engage in a dance off, and are separated by the returning smugglers, who restrain Zuniga. Having attacked a Reddit troll formerly, José now has no choice but to join Carmen and the smugglers (“Suis-nous à travers la campagne” “When Bad Things Happen to Tenors”).

Act 3

A protected wild preserve in the mountains

Carmen and José enter with the fair trade goods purveyors and their booty (“Écoute, écoute, compagnons” “Bootylicious”); Carmen has become bored with José and tells him scornfully that he should go back to his baby mother. Frasquita and Mercédès amuse themselves by reading their positive message horoscopes on-line; Carmen joins them and finds that the cards are foretelling her passage into an alternate reality. The women depart to teach sensitivity skills to the customs officers as José is placed on guard duty.

Micaëla enters with a Lonely Planet guide, seeking José and determined to rescue him from Carmen (“Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante” “Bitch Stole My Aria”). On hearing a gunshot she hides; it is José, who has photo bombed an intruder who proves to be Escamillo. José’s pleasure at meeting the bullfighter turns to anger when Escamillo declares his flirty crush with Carmen. The pair pretend fight (“Je suis Escamillo, toréro de Grenade” “Four Million View YouTube Video”), but are interrupted by the returning smugglers and girls (“Holà, holà José” “Quit With Your Misogynistic Latino Slurs Already, Horndogs”). As Escamillo leaves he invites everyone to front row seats at his next puppy super bowl in Seville. Micaëla is discovered; at first, José will not leave with her but he agrees to go when told that his mother is on a casino binge tour. As he departs, vowing he will return, Escamillo is heard in the distance, singing the toreador’s song.

Act 4

A square in Seville. At the back, the walls of an ancient six screen amphitheater

Zuniga, Frasquita and Mercédès are among the crowd awaiting the arrival of the fighters (“Les voici ! Voici la quadrille!” “Fight Foo, Not Bulls!”). Escamillo enters with Carmen, and they express their respectful, peer-based love (“Si tu m’aimes, Carmen” “R We On 4 2Nite?”). As Escamillo goes into the arena, Frasquita warns Carmen that José is nearby, but Carmen is unafraid and willing to speak to him. Alone, she is confronted by the Zolofted José (“C’est toi ! C’est moi !” “Wait, You’re Just Not That Into Me?). While he pleads vainly for her to return to him, cheers are heard from the arena. As José makes his last entreaty, Carmen contemptuously throws down the soy latte he gave her and attempts to enter the arena. He then offers her a conscious uncoupling, and as Escamillo is acclaimed by the crowds, Carmen goes somewhere nice, like heaven. José kneels and sings “Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée! “I Will Be On The Late Night Circuit To Apologize Starting This Very Week”) as the crowd exits the arena, José confesses to being very confused about the woman he loved.

Advice for the Birds

Advice for the birds

Everything you were told in childhood was wrong;

the dusty artifacts misfiled, the map of the badlands.

misinterpreted, and you, on century-farm Saturdays,

collared to the television, the day stretched out in cereal boxes

that found your name too long to personalize.

Feather and claw batted the cage of your true no-self.

Writing out dumb assignments in your cursive,

you saw the window but not the flight path.

Now I stroke you, feathered thing, and brood in your nest:

all the names they gave you may you shed like the lizard

all the sky be for your comfort and what made you fragile,

be ever warm-blooded, quick-witted, your wishes baldly displayed.

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/0888099303/zone-3-vol-31-no-1-spring-2016.aspx

Class Aves

https://tabjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tab_vol3.5_SEPT2015.pdf

They write themselves in the sky, the Secretary birds,
while New World vultures gaze down tube noses
to see a pin fowl feed its young on crop milk.
The gruiforme misfits, drab and button punk,
beneath the perfumed breath of the superficial doves
soaking their belly feathers in watery holes.
And my own, answeriformes, the screamers:
ducks, swan geese, screaming formally
behind my floating world on the never ending river.
All these families of strong flyers, auks and terns;
brilliant and gregarious, I’ve seen at parties
shrieking flight obscenities, toes front and back
snacking on the seeds of their own name.
Todies, motmots, rollers, whoopers and hornbills,
once naked and helpless before the great
dharma of evolution, ascend the swallowing ice,
to specialize in warm blood by sunset, rising at dawn with their own kind

24 hr news cycle

https://www.buddhistpoetryreview.org/archive/issue-eight/merridawn-duckler

 

First the moon hangs huge flag on the horizon.
Then is a small, milky lozenge in the eastern sky.

The rain under the street light falls orange, like dying pine needles.

The street in snow, muffled.
Private steps on the light fall, over loose footing.

One time: a field of lavender.
Another, water under the boat doubled over, black as film strip.

Daily, the light forms a crust, arising from no central place.

I learned from my teacher
How no day is connected to any other day

At night, my right hand is empty, in what’s left lays the string and can.

Beowulf on the Couch

C'Opera

C’opera – 2006