print previewback MELISSA BARRETT
Your Virtue Unswerving, But Miles from Any Mark
Skewered to a thicket, you sleep on a mattress
piled with straw while spiders
slap the screens. You chase a decade of dust
from the back porch, cook with
the one pot you find and kneel into another
morning, your fingers steadying
the pages for you often tremor, the guilt
forest-thick, your throat
might close forever if you sing that one
too many times. To whom?
The horseflies zipping the evening to shreds?
Forget this knock-kneed
metaphor of a cabin, a forest, your one pot
sunk in its lime rim—
Look at the lake, the water peeling toward us
like spoons, a ladder of light
and the fish in their soft armor, numb to a fear
of drowning, mouths agape,
searching the water’s mossen lid—to be so
dumbstruck is to really know God 
Everyone Here Is a Tourist
Your Virtue Unswerving, But Miles from Any Mark