Karla Linn Merrifield

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021

Wholly Holy

Karla Linn Merrifield

The generative scaffold of this tribute poem is the C chord, easy, then the F chord, hard. Mr. Waits chooses to play flattened, but it’s not his badly tuned guitar, it’s his deliberate dissonance. So, like Tom, I pick gingerly, unconventionally jumping as if catapulting on adverbs from the low E to D string on his G chord , hoping happily, haplessly, I don’t fall in love with him or anybody else, but his voice in my gravelly tones at the end of forgotten nights— cigarettes, booze, maybe weed-infused, maybe pheromonally induced karma of lovingly lonesome bar-stool longing along the fretboard toward hits the profound sound hole of our guitars. Let’s search these measures in Time for all the lost places in our lives.

Karla Linn Merrifield lives in Florida and has had 800+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the 2019 full-length Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. She is currently at work on a poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars to be published by Before Your Quiet Eyes Holograph Series (Rochester, NY) in late 2021.