Michael Meyerhofer
What Your Refrigerator Wanted to Tell You
The first time you opened me,
my heart leapt like a puppy in rain.
The way you stared back then,
that wolfish lingering in your eyes,
disappearing for ages then
filling all my absences with milk
and jugs of wrung-out fruit
and cheese from foreign lands
so that I could grasp a bit better
what it's like to feel something
growing in the dark. But gradually
you tired of me – I could tell –
so that by our last night,
all you could do was curse
as you worked a sponge then
sandpaper then a knife
over everything you’d forgotten,
which I kept just in case.
Grenade
Remember that day we prayed
in a cathedral older than America
and someone walked in long enough
to toss us a baseball made of iron?
I think it matters, how it blossomed
into bone-white fire, so many tongues
gone still as sculpture of the sea.
That both angels and gargoyles can
sleep with their wings unfurled.
That we were kneeling, not praying.
A Story About Survival
Let’s say you live in the shadow
of a mountain because you like
how its outline cradles you,
how its spires brush the clouds
so gently they don’t even cry out.
Then one day, scientists announce
a hundred-mile chunk of left-
overs from the galaxy’s formation
hurtling in your direction,
too big to blast or steer away.
But someone has the bright idea
of altering the Earth’s mass
just enough to nudge it to one side—
so in a flurry of rivets and gears,
they finally build that elevator
stretching from the stars
to your backyard. Then, they start
chipping away at the summit,
a million men working day and night
to launch bits of rock into space.
After a month, everything seems
pretty much the same except
for the elevator itself—the clamor,
the grind, the smell of grease
burrowing deeper than soap can go.
Then after a year, your beloved
shadow starts to thin like an old sweater,
uninvited palms of sunlight pressed
along your driveway like dead leaves.
A knot forms in your gut, an unease
that has almost nothing to do
with those endless news helicopters
circling like worried houseflies.
A modern marvel, everyone says,
noting how many tons vanish each day.
But in your dreams, your skin
is being peeled off one layer at a time
by potbellied angels in hardhats,
then one day you wake up
and go outside and it’s all gone.
Just rubble, dust, and rocky plains
filed down smooth as a cracked tooth,
the workmen already packing up,
their big yellow drills replaced
with a hundred bottles of champagne.
And you know you should feel
grateful that you’ve been spared
the molten supersonic splashdown,
that your kids have a future or would
if you’d bothered to have them.
But there’s an odd chill in the air—
too much sun, too much space between
your toes and the clouds. Before
the last truck leaves, a man in a suit
walks up, grins, and hands you a check.
Michael Meyerhofer's fifth poetry book, Ragged Eden, was published by Glass Lyre Press. He has been the recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Award, the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize, and other honors. His work has appeared in Southern Review, The Sun, Ploughshares, Rattle, Hayden's Ferry, Gargoyle Magazine, Missouri Review, and other journals. He is also the author of a fantasy series and the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more information and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.