Mamie Morgan lives in South Carolina with her husband and their dog, Wednesday Stewart. Her latest collection, Midsummer Night's Toast, was selected by Natalie Shapero as the 2025 winner of Ohio University Press's Hollis Summers Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Garden & Gun, Washington Square Review, Sixth Finch, Four Way Review, Smartish Pace, Carolina Quarterly, Muzzle, Oxford American, and elsewhere.
Vulture: Final
Might’ve been an accidental quarrel of self,
both wings atop a radio tower interrupting
two-quarter time the BBC Beethoven waves
young Edmund Morris desired
from his colonized home, what little classical
could reach it. My husband studies biographers
so he might become a biographer
of biographers who study presidents
and other squirrel fruits of inheritance.
Eric says, Isn’t it strange when our spouses
essentially write the poems by just
being alive. Any drunk creative writing
instructor we should have never trusted
warns that you mustn’t novel
before you story, so my husband begins small
inside essay’s torment-muscle a fable
of our love, titles it Do Poets Drink Wine
Standing Up?, an exploration of all the ways
I am not like Dylan Thomas. My poet does
not hold court, My poet does not burn barns
to the hungry ground. Insistent he is of
my regularness, avuncular as a hand
of bananas. Who has the heart to mention
what the literary internet posse thinks
regarding a man possessing anything.
Documentaries are so stupid arrogant—
their carriage of intel, time, monied
perspective. Take the Netflix family
cobbling a UFO from Home Depot,
from wonder. When it grasps backyard flight
they mistake a son inside or it’s a hoax,
we’ll never know, this 2009 version
of reality television. I was in my twenties,
worried sick and naïve and watching
it playout on national news. Two truths:
a boy soaring and a boy hiding out
in the garage attic of great daring. A late
bloomer—I found true anything before me.
The kid’s an adult now, named Falcon.
I could’ve mentioned that earlier,
but we’ve got to keep a little inventory
within ourselves, like the recipe for a special scent.
If you told anyone, they could just claw off
with it and then who, exactly, would you be.
Smart Girl Dreams
We’re driving our old television that works to my sister
whose old television doesn’t, and some Atlantic article’s got
Alan wondering why high school reunions still exist,
what with all the false gravity already inside our screens.
Only way I’d show up, he says, is with a hefty dose
of malintent. Lance or butterfly or dress the wound,
all my younger friends want to discuss is the enneagram,
true gravity, single digits, extrovert or intro. I heart all
the Tik Tocks where grown men carrying tote bags delineate
why they don’t want to come to your birthday, your baby shower,
your going away. Like when the restaurant hostess asks:
Bar or table? we understand she means, You shopping
for people, or you wanna be left alone? The book shop wants
me to record a promotional video for the class I’m teaching
on joy within the artistic practice, so I wait until it’s hair-washing day
to send them one. Everyone knows if I’m pretty folks will register.
Alan is glad that I’m reading books again, even if they’re just thrillers.
This one takes place in Sussex, where we want to believe
tinctures Laurel’s crafted for her little sister weren’t bella-donna
poison, that she’s not holding her captive in the attic
of their inherited estate named for squirrels or royalty.
In every dream, I live in a dorm room, strange since college
brought little trauma or happiness, in one of them my roommates
are sixteen different mailboxes speaking sixteen different languages.
If I raise each red flag I can speak any one of them, and do.
All of my voices come out the elegant handwriting
of private school kids, rich ones wearing furs to the grocery
over their pajamas. I probably shouldn’t write when I’m like this,
when I’m trying to say I could take any reunion or leave it,
six of one, half a dozen of the other, however goes the egg carton
adage. If only we could cocktail party: you, me, the pool my sister
and I dug bare-hands in the yard when our minds were young, strong.
Olympic-sized, shimmer-warrantied to hold more than anything inside.
Volume 16.2, summer 26
Mamie Morgan
