Small

I dreamed I held a small Emily Dickinson in a gunny sack. Emily Dickinson or drowned kittens. I read, years ago, of Emily Dickinson and sister Vinnie’s anger that brother Austin’s wife Susan aborted children. I remember how I first met my son Nathaniel, a butterfly behind my navel.









Merry Speece has published two chapbooks of poetry and been a recipient of a state arts commission fellowship in prose. Her mixed-genre Sisters Grimke Book of Days (Oasis Press, England), which one reviewer called a prose poem, is a work of fragmented historical scholarship. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.