Rebecca Mertz

4 poems

**

Swim


light in a pool was always a sharp
mystery...the eager schoolgirls in their
cupboards with the

lipstick...Chris loved bare legs
and shoulders...concrete

scraping her soft heels
it was only June that year she

ballooned her body into
weightlessness, eyes unsheathed
against the sun for

hours...she cowed even the closest god,
the beefy lifeguard

was yelling
NO BIRDS ALLOWED!

**

Miracle 1: The Wedding


Chris clutched tulips &
roses...stood in drag

the heads all turned backwards
faces into one face bleeding

out celebration...sweat
infused stems...petals...slipping

toward phenomenon...she turned herself
into herself

**

Miracle 2


it began to be the time of off
spring and radishes

sprung down into crevices where
Chris kept her numb fingers

warm from the frost

her mother wondered how
the geraniums grew so plentiful

& the tulips kissed so wide
but said “geraniums are a cheap
flower”

**

Miracle 3


Chris spit into the hard ground
crumbs of stars

reflecting against the white
fence

upstairs, Chris pressed
the mud into her mother’s

flesh until it
opened wide

she massaged her fat red heart and
veins, shocked them harshly

into movement

**

return to sawbuck 4.2

**
Rebecca Mertz is currently an MFA student in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is the poetry editor of Pitt’s creative writing journal, Hot Metal Bridge. Her poems have appeared or will appear in H_NGM_N, Otoliths, Zero Ducats, Elimae, Indefinite Space, Word For/word, Divine Dirt Quarterly, Weave Magazine, Thirty First Bird Review, Whiskey and Fox, and an upcoming anthology entitled How Dirty Girls Get Clean. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she survived four years of radical conservatism and homophobia, among other contemporary American blights. She lives in Lawerenceville, PA with her genius girlfriend, four dogs, an avant-garde poet and a bartending erotica writer.