Mary Meriam: An Entering

Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam is a poet from rural New Jersey with an MFA from Columbia University. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Literary Imagination, Light Quarterly, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, The Spectator, and Rattle, and are forthcoming in Sixty-Six: A Journal of Sonnet Studies, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, Moira Egan’s “hot sonnets” anthology, and possibly Annie Finch’s villanelle anthology. Her sonnet about waltzing with Julie Andrews was a finalist in A Prairie Home Companion’s Bed of Roses Love Sonnet Contest and read on National Public Radio. Her chapbook, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was published in 2006 by Modern Metrics Press and received an award from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Another chapbook, The Poet’s Zodiac, was a finalist in the 2009 Robin Becker contest at Seven Kitchens Press.

An Entering

I am asleep on my city’s dead street,
when you take my hand, and then we are walking;
there is silence, but I can feel your hand talking,
pulling me deeper into your warm, sweet
language, speaking to me, with a teacher’s eloquence,
of your need, which is beginning to dawn on me
in the dark theater, where no one can see
the tutorial of your kisses, which are kindling the sense
of warmer and closer things yet to be known —
how could I then awaken, hideous, alone?