Jed Myers

So, this is how we meet—through the ink
slits in the paper-white blank

between us. I cannot make out
your face—nor your hair, your hat

at, I imagine, a familiar tilt
to your right, my left—is that glint

your eye? Can you catch my blink
as I peer, up close to this little black

stab in the page, the l in look?
Your pupil millimeters from the book

or the screen, we are almost nose
to nose. Each turned from the throes

of Earth for the moment. I’ve got a pear
in my hand. A Bosc. Look here—

it’s brown-skinned. I’ve had a bite—
the meat of it gritty, sweet, near-white

and glistening. Can you see it? I want
nothing, at this near and distant

moment, more than to have you hold
its firm frictiony fridge-cold

solidity. Or is it my heart
I wish I could slip, still pounding and hot,

through the slot of t in the word for it?
And your desire—can you pour it

out of your eye, through this grating
I’ve carved for us, for our meeting

like this? I may not still be alive,
but I’m here, on my side of the sieve,

pear in my palm, and in the narrow
part near the stem, something’s burrowed

a blackness, dot of an i. A worm?
It’s like a bullet hole in your arm.

 

Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. Two of his poetry collections, The Nameless (Finishing Line Press) and Watching the Perseids (winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), are to be released in 2014. He won the 2012 Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award offered by Southern Indiana Review, and received the 2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Atlanta Review, Sanskrit, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere.  (Author Photo: © Rosanne Olson).