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Two Poems from Mary McCall

 

A Mermaid’s Tale

Your eyes like sea glass:
hard now, but the edges
will soften in time. You get that
from me, you know—

but you don’t.
You don’t know how
I escaped the tiled floors,
the messages
from the other secretaries
with tired voices. Slid out

of my heels and nylons,
laid on the dunes
like a second skin.
My toes pressed in
the cool, wet sand.

I met the man
who would become your father.
He handed me a mermaid’s purse
and said if one were to stroke
a shark, one direction is rough enough
to peel away flesh, but the other
is soft as sand in the moonlight.

The sea understands
that women carry oceans;
it absorbs
our hidden currents and tucks
them into shells
so that seagulls must drop them
to smash
open their secrets.




To My Lost Earring


Two years and it ends like this—
tumbling through strands,
brushing my shoulder
in a farewell gesture,
or so I think. After I rescued you
from my boyfriend’s sheets, the folds
of my purse, the lining
of my pocket. Your partner
misses you. (Perhaps you are
lying under the seat sharing
the cover of a crumpled napkin
with a quarter, metal-to-metal.)
Someone else might find you,
alter you to fit with another.
Will she twist you around
and around in circles when
she is nervous, like I did?
Or polish you, like I did
not? As you slide through her
skin, do not whisper
my secrets.


Mary McCall is a masters student in the rhetoric/composition program at Purdue University where she also teaches first-year composition. She hasalso attended a graduate poetry class at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared in Chantarelle's Notebook, The Storyteller, Thick with Conviction, Drown in My Own Fears, and elsewhere.




                                                                            
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