Two bulky medics snatch her from the sofa,
bind her to the stretcher, roll her away,
and she shrieks like a weasel dragged from its den.
Heads poke from open doors along the hall.
My mother and I—cheeks hot, eyes fastened hard
to the floor tiles—reach the exit stairs.
I sit on a cold step, chew my lip to blood.
But didn’t someone need to make that call?
The steel door blocks her voice, and no one sees
me plucking at my sock but Bela Fleck
above us on the landing, banjo loose
against one thigh, his picking fast and faster,
dissolving the cinderblock walls,
throwing a spatter of stars at the dark.
–
Merrill Oliver Douglas’s collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, and SWWIM Every Day, among others.