<i><b>Wicked Alice Poetry Journal

wicked alice| fifth anniversary issue



Mary Meriam

Farewell, Farcia

Don’t try my patience, gentle telephone.
Go split your wires, crack your hand-set bone,
go digital, go slow, go beat a drum,
go ring yourself to death. I will not come.

I'll hear instead the doves cry overhead.
So still I’ll stay, she’ll surely think I’m dead
to love; but no, I hear the loving doves
that fit together like two hands in gloves.

The doves fly west to east and east to west.
But why? Because doves know love has no rest.
The doves compose me with their loving song
transforming into goodness what is wrong.

And I remain below, a single one
like every other single 'neath the sun,
taking a walk in the dim dove-land wood.
Farewell, Farcia, farce will bring no good.


Mary Meriam's poems and essays have been published in So To Speak, Bay
Windows, Queer Ramblings, Wicked Alice, and Lodestar Quarterly. She is
a regular contributor to Sinister Wisdom, Street Spirit, and Harrington
Lesbian Literary Quarterly. Her first book of poems, The Countess of
Flatbroke (Modern Metrics, 2006) features an afterword by Lillian
Faderman.