Jed Myers
2021 Michelle Boisseau Prize Finalist
—
My Brother and I at Har Jehuda
The cemetery grounds go weedy and unmown,
the shared headstone sinking lower in the late-
summer growth. Below the engraved names
and dates, what’s under BELOVED HUSBAND
on the left and BELOVED WIFE on the right
goes hidden for now in a splash of green blades
and stems of what, chicory, Queen Anne’s lace,
yarrow, I don’t know, and can’t quite recreate
the phrases we worked out that are now carved
into those polished squares, for him something
about how he’d still light our way, and for her
how she’d danced through life, yes that’s close,
but I’m looking past the rows and out through
the wire fence at the backs of those brick houses
where I can practically hear people hollering
just like our folks before they moved their bones
in under this overgrowth, how they’d fill up
a living room, bedroom, or kitchen with bitter
volleys, music we’d finish our homework to,
what they thought they were keeping low after
we’d gone to bed. I’d listen late as if studying
what to anticipate in love’s name. We’re awake
now and they’re not. We’re standing here quiet
enough to hear Darby Creek twenty yards west
and Township Line Road on the far side of those
houses. Some grass and blue flowers do seem
to lean in a swell on the granite with thoughtless
affection. I daydream the dead feel their peace.
Jed Myers is the author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels(Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award) and Love’s Test (winner, Grayson Books Chapbook Contest). His poems can be found in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle and is poetry editor for Bracken.
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