The Acrobats

I spend my solo life in windy spaces,
way up above the throng, no safety net
below, exposed to row on row of faces
fixed on the acrobats in silhouette.
I’ll fall with one misstep or if the wire
splits or my fingers slip. I climb the rungs,
trembling, trembling. Rising higher, higher,
I cough out all the fumbles in my lungs,
and here’s my tiny platform, just a disk
that fits my feet. From here, I leap and swing
into the flashing lights, familiar with the risk
by now, but shocked to see you stand and fling
yourself from your own platform over there
and catch me from your swing through the thin air.

by Mary Meriam, from The Lillian Trilogy.

Editor’s Note: This delightful sonnet describes a moment of fear and exhilaration—the acrobat leaps, but the reader flies.

Dinner

Tonight I set the dinner table for
the remnants of my phantom family.
Here is the marriage spent in fantasy,
here is my stillborn brother, here is war
that wiped out all my relatives and tore
my mother’s mind to pieces, here is me,
here is a place beside me for big tree,
and here’s my sister shot down with a roar.
We flipped and landed upside down in hell,
no parachutes, just higher, hotter flames
burning our places right down to our names.
The empty plates have nothing left to tell.
Here is a table, here a fork and knife,
here is the phantom of a better life.

by Mary Meriam, from Conjuring My Leafy Muse

Editor’s Note: At first glance, this doesn’t read like a sonnet. The enjambment fractures the narrative, yet also perfectly complements the content of the poem: a broken family. Upon careful rereading, the rhyme pulls the story together and emphasizes the narrator’s sorrow at the dinner table.