Anger

By Merrill Oliver Douglas

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Can’t get enough. I adore how it stings
the tongue, mouth bulging with honey. 
Turns lungs red, a scream held in. 
	The longer I keep it, the sweeter it burns. 

I walk it back and forth 
from midnight till four in the morning,
bouncing a ball on the hardwood floor.
	Screw the downstairs neighbors. 

For laughs, I drape myself in a coat
of glittering knives and race 
the scratched Civic down Twist Run Road
	doing eighty-five, horn blasting. 

Years ago, bees stung my child.
I kissed his tears, then flooded the hive 
with lawn mower gas and tossed six matches. 
	Flames make a gorgeous bouquet.

Each summer since, the ghosts of those bees
have sent live bees to chase us.
With every jab one more bee drops dead. 
	There is no end to this story. 

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Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full-length collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. It will be published in 2024. 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, Stone Canoe, Little Patuxent Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.

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• 9/12 / Poetry Reading in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), celebrating its 20th year, with visiting poet-in-residence Jordan Pérez + SWWIM’s own Alexandra Lytton Regalado / Conversation moderated by Letras Latinas’s Laura Villareal to immediately follow / The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:00 pm EST / Free

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