Sample Poems by Philip Memmer
Parking Lot
Beneath the lights,
paramedics
tatter a sheet
of unmarked snow—
the shape in slush
the body leaves
tells how long help
took to arrive.
Already now
it fills with snow,
fading to gray,
then even white.
Even at night
the white hurts eyes
beneath the lights
of strip mall lots,
and nights are long—
the kids have hours
to find this snow,
unmarked, lit-up,
and waiting, still,
to be re-scarred
by sports cars named
for birds of prey.
Mouse
You know that smell—it overwhelms
every last room, insisting on itself
until, like an infant’s fury,
it is simply gone. I check the trap
in the kitchen cupboard
and there’s the mouse, gray fur
not yet stiff. Peeling back the bar,
shaking him into a bag—and still
he could be a toy, despite the crease of red
in his thumb-sized chest, the dread
even the smallest of deaths
brings to a house. A fire
in the hearth, a woman nursing
her almost sleeping son. My boy,
who one day might weep
for such a loss, or might, laughing,
scrape the blood-matted hair
from the heel of his boot—
but who today, when I read him stories,
took his purposeful finger
and pressed it hard to the sketch
of Goodnight Moon’s young mouse,
the first thing he’s learned
in the realm of words. Enough,
almost, to forget the reproach
of air gone sharp, the line of fur
hardened to the plank. More footsteps,
even now, behind the wall—entire lives
lived in that dark. In terror.
But not his life. Not his.
Swelter
Down the street, children
screaming—a game—
then quiet. The dark throbs
with motors, insects, charcoal.
I stop to make sure
the dog is only sleeping.
Cain's Wife
How surprised he was,
after the stories he’d been taught,
to wander into a village
impossibly peopled—and then
to meet me, fair and unafraid
and—I admit it freely—
thrilled by his vagabond stare.
Imagine it—believing your family
is the only family, the first ever,
and especially cursed
by the only god there is.
It’s a wonder he could speak
at all, a wonder he could touch me
so gently, as if some wrong
was hidden within his strength.
He was never much good
at farming, worse with the animals,
but even my sisters stopped laughing
when he built a city for our son.
The first night we slept there
I dreamt of our children, their children
and theirs as well, craftsmen
and musicians, masterful all—
and when I woke to distant thunder
I blessed their father, even as he flinched
in his sleep, and never again
questioned where he came from,
or what he did to earn
that beautiful scar.