Directions to Our House

Heading northeast you will pass a wall of evergreens roughly the length of my ancestors,

standing awkwardly on each other’s shoulders. Some came steerage, others sipped in estates,

all of them live here, all of them tower above me. Each contains the naked seed, unafraid. For

what would fear solve? The seed cannot be abdicated. Look for the mile marker that says how far from civilization we are. Take the second exit. By late afternoon, there will be obdurate shadows. Signs say coast but the earliest sign of life is movement so stumble down to the Trask and squat

and watch for speckled alevin, moving from gravel to freedom.

Merridawn Duckler is a writer and visual artist from Oregon and author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press) IDIOM (Washburn Prize, Harbor Review) MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press) and ARRANGEMENT (Southernmost Books). She won the Beullah Rose Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. Work in Seneca Review, Interim, Posit, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and Best Small Fictions 2025. www.merridawnduckler.com Instagram: @merridawnduckler

Sonnet at Zero

Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass…

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

Strange to say I feel no fear,

just calm readiness for what’s next,

and here we go under a gray cloud layer

earpopping into blue sky over Boston Harbor–

we skitter like a waterbug in the Cessna.

You know you can use a penny to replace a fuse,

said my brother last week, and I thought,

who has a penny? I don’t even have a quarter

in my bag anymore. No change

for the man on the sidewalk with the paper cup

reciting, Change  change change, as he shakes it,

and I say, I’m sorry I have none. I don’t even carry cash–

just loss and desire, rattling and crumpled,

and I’m taking them with me like a field guide.

Melissa McKinstry hosts quarterly poetry and jazz evenings and curates a community Poet Tree in San Diego. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in many journals including Beloit, Adroit, Narrative, and Best New Poets 2023 and 2025, and was selected for the 2025 New Ohio Review Literary Prize and a 2026 Pushcart Prize. An Adroit Djanikian Scholar and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Millay House Rockland, she currently serves on the Alumni Council for Pacific University’s MFA program and the Board of the Millay House Rockland. MelissaMcKinstry.com.

Again, Dragging a Chair in Front of the Fireplace,

I begin bringing back the dead.

No loose ends. Not even a church,

or a steeple. Only the hairs

of my son’s blonde beard nubbly as en grisaille

graphite on newsprint coming further into focus

at four in the afternoon as the winter day fades

and his young beard invades.

My hands open, welcoming or deflecting–

open fans as kindling catches and crackles.

With the smoke perusing the flue

pale and gray, it is not impossible to remember.

Once, catch of dull blade

vibrated from his chin. I could feel

the drag. Each time after, chose a new razor sharp

along the guard, kept seeing Wyeth’s Barn Nap–

his friend supine in an old dory surrounded by hay,

blonde beard with gray, each hair stroked in watercolor,

never offered for sale, an honor to impending death,

a mythical Viking burial.

I start to feel I might touch him again,

forever, as all those mornings rise up before me:

of course, the whoosh and thump of the oxygen,

his clackety body stiffening in seizure, his rictus grin,

both of us so alive in the Ativan alarm,

then each gold hair on this chin quivering as the seizing quit,

so whatever was smooth and delicious as honey

seems possible again.

Tonight the rain, wood smoke. My hands

empty in firelight. Small urn with a stone on the mantel.

Melissa McKinstry hosts quarterly poetry and jazz evenings and curates a community Poet Tree in San Diego. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in many journals including Beloit, Adroit, Narrative, and Best New Poets 2023 and 2025, and was selected for the 2025 New Ohio Review Literary Prize and a 2026 Pushcart Prize. An Adroit Djanikian Scholar and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Millay House Rockland, she currently serves on the Alumni Council for Pacific University’s MFA program and the Board of the Millay House Rockland. MelissaMcKinstry.com.