These four poems by Edie Meade linger in parking lots, dark apartments, motel rooms, and rubble, all the beautiful/hideous doorways where contradictions interlock…
by: Edie Meade
Blue Shoes, Nonverbal
A little boy lost. My lover tucked me into him after the Amber Alert squalled, my blood galloping its midnight message through the motor court: pink hoodie, blue shoes, nonverbal. Shush of hand on the saddle between my hip and rib, I was safe as a toy horse in a child’s pocket. But awake—the boy! What if he were here? What if he were mine? I climbed the limp lace of myself, unbridled to the window. A hundred steaming air conditioners hacked up hair; the gutter ticked water clocks into pocks of tabby; lion-ocean roared its unseen beyond. Where the vinyl drape curled its lip, I saw pale bones crushed into pavement and the lichen of peach paint lifting from the columns, the rusty trunks of stranger caravans, the whole lot a shining dogtooth drip. And in the storm-drain tiny funeral boats of cigarette butts, darting cigarillo tips, an odyssey of single shot liquor bottles. All circled helplessly, a frenzy of guilt. How do you lose a child? How do you hold onto him in a storm? Oh, his pink lashing. Blue shoes in the dark the color of the dark—I saw them bolt across the sky! No. I held myself at length, then crawled back to the stable of my lover. There were no words. Long monk robes of rain swept on over the sea, searching in silence for silence, the moon a lantern passing between clouds.
Careful
Care: “Old English caru (noun), carian (verb), of Germanic of Germanic origin; related to Old High German chara ‘grief, lament’, charon ‘grieve’, and Old Norse kǫr ‘sickbed’.” [New Oxford American Dictionary]
We slow where long-ago removed magnolias destroyed the pavement with abundance. My son’s knees knock his handlebars, innocence in outgrowing innocence, and a paring knife swizzles perfectly into my core. “Careful,” I pant. Careful, a thousand times a day careful. I am learning that every line of a poem must be a poem, a little face smiling out of an open wail. We pass brass rings marking historically significant bulletholes in the brick wall, then my son admires iridescent beetles destroying a peace rose. At the corner a sidewalk veteran Jekylling wiry and aggressive in the Bojangles parking lot tells us he’s freshly orphaned. His bandaged thumb hitches to the funeral home with the motel porte-cochère and earthbound, concrete angels. Nod and keep moving. The light changes. “Love your mother!” the man howls at my son. The knife bores inward, digging a chamber inside the chamber of my heart. Careful, careful. We hurry into the street, stranger weeping after: “Don’t take anything for granted! Please!” Only my son looks back.
[In Ypsilanti, Michigan, Shattering My Dolly Parton]
In Ypsilanti, Michigan, shattering my Dolly Parton
votive candle on the stoop of the propped security
door. I am my busted liquor store box of forgotten family
heirloom junk. The landlord pretends not to understand
my accent, squeezes me into a bear of cold-hardened
honey. Until I repeat phrases, until I don’t. Until
credit checks fail, security deposits disappear with the kids’
bikes. Thought crystalizes in the shatter: I’m stuck,
and also moving. Again, always moving further into the
hole. Desiccated of sweetness, pressed mum, dead baby’s
breath, past preservation a weary book of closure. I know
what you call what that takes all of you, emitting nothing
what-for the squall of your demise. But how do you escape
what light cannot. It’s not a question, what’s too late to ask.
The Yellow Line
From the popcorn ceiling sky, ticking
dog-tag beads, dust-flung lo-fi tracking
rainbow contrails, there: one yellow line
falls from the map, billowing kite tail,
invisible string. We hunker in mountains
of rebarred concrete, deconstructed
schools, wide-eyed pupils of transformation
picking the pavement pores gone
dandelion instantly, instantly more solid
than bone, more permanent, impermeable,
a border from nowhere. We had learned
in the abstract, never witnessing a border
descend, how ribbons cut to ribbons, how
the drawn is drawn and quarters quartered,
place displaced. Now, gravestone still in ruins,
the line takes us for dead or leaves us for dead,
passes us over as it passes over us, determined
as a blade of shadow on a sundial,
and with our left hands we cover our eyes
and with our right hands our mouths,
to keep dust out, and to keep dust in.
Edie Meade is a writer and musician in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been published in Louisiana Literature Journal, Gone Lawn, Room Magazine, Invisible City, and The Harvard Advocate.
Twitter: @ediemeade
Instagram and Threads: @edie_thee_meade
Bluesky: @ediemeade.bsky.social
Website: https://ediemeade.com/
