"Driving at Twilight"
by Merrill Oliver Douglas
I beg forgiveness for my boredom.
Bored with this steering wheel, guardrails,
news on the half-hour, truly bored
with breathing. I don’t taste life
in the old way: ice on the tongue,
ripe cantaloupe. How can I keep myself
bottomless and thirsty as I felt
at nineteen, when I ran the neighborhood
watching for a flash of gold ribbon,
praying mantis? Forgive me:
I’ve neglected the moods of our swollen,
pewter river. Give me the grace for once
to relish L-I-Q-U-O-R-S in tipsy
neon arrowing down toward the roof
of Parkway Wine & Spirits. Visible
spirits absolve me! All at once I see
those brushstrokes of cloud in the west:
eyebrows arched in amazement.
Bored with this steering wheel, guardrails,
news on the half-hour, truly bored
with breathing. I don’t taste life
in the old way: ice on the tongue,
ripe cantaloupe. How can I keep myself
bottomless and thirsty as I felt
at nineteen, when I ran the neighborhood
watching for a flash of gold ribbon,
praying mantis? Forgive me:
I’ve neglected the moods of our swollen,
pewter river. Give me the grace for once
to relish L-I-Q-U-O-R-S in tipsy
neon arrowing down toward the roof
of Parkway Wine & Spirits. Visible
spirits absolve me! All at once I see
those brushstrokes of cloud in the west:
eyebrows arched in amazement.

Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full length collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. It will be published in 2024. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Little Patuxent Review and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.