TODD MERCER - POEMS

TODD MERCER won the Dyer-Ives Kent County Prize for Poetry, the National Writers Series Poetry Prize and the Grand Rapids Festival Flash Fiction Award. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, appeared at Right Hand Pointing. Mercer's recent poetry and fiction appear in 100 Word Story, Defenestration, The Lake, Literary Orphans, Praxis, Split Lip Magazine and The Magnolia Review.

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​State Street Corridor Beat Cop, Beat

​The purse-snatcher runs from Garfield Boulevard
into Robert Taylor Homes. The responding officer
offers to file a report, but he’s not a crazy person.
There’s no way he’s going up in there, a lawless complex
of pathology, gangbangers and government cheese.
Don’t you know, lady? They gun down hundreds
every weekend in these projects. Life is
dirt cheap here. How they don’t run out of people,
that’s beyond my understanding. We won’t
set foot in there at night. Our badges
draw the wrong attention. Buy you a new purse.
Get some friends in better neighborhoods.
Robert Taylor’s no place for a
nice white woman to knock on doors,
looking for what’s lost. I didn’t make
this problem plaguing us, and I can’t fix it.

​Bladeworkers

​Cut
me,
I’ll bleed.
Don’t cut me
out of curiosity.
Karma is a motherfucker,
if you wake it from slumber,
when exhausted by settling scores.
Karma will set me straight as well.
It won’t need a knife,
a surprise,
malice,
an
edge.

​The Surveyor Would’ve Named it
Lyon’s Landing
          [Grand Rapids, Michigan]

​Haven’t seen the source myself, but this great river rises
from rivulets. Its lake-ward route from our town onward--
that’s familiar. The water’s low enough in drought months
to walk across the rapids. Is it clean? Some folks eat fish
pulled from brown water. I’d catch and release.
Don’t drink it, think of industry along these banks,
farm runoff up-ridge, diluted. These cities along the flow, sisters
in spirit. The towns berm and dyke it, floodwall, channel,
they raise, lower, dam it, suction up
and discharge downstream. The settlements create, produce,
consume, become. They are booming, here instead of
somewhere else. Here, this high ground
on a bend of waterway, as far as craft
from inland seas can navigate upstream.

​Hush

​The ductwork pings in expansion
after the furnace cycles.
Overhead florescent ballasts
hum a background functionality.
Spare, depopulated noises
of a bustling day-use building.
 
Outdoors the horns of traffic are nullifed.
The boy, accustomed to
breathing in mercury vapor,
breathing out carbon monoxide
hears his heart beating for once
in lieu of the standard audio.
 
Metropolitan kid transplanted
to this wide spot in the road
peels off sonic onion layers,
reaching the indivisible.
 
He cuts through a Zen riddle:
absence sounds like a blinker light,
a long pause between travelers,
nothingness of epic proportion.

​Unkillable

​Lunkheads yelling, “YOLO!”
riding bikes down mountainsides,
jumping from roofs on camera,
reality TV wannabees
seeing what it takes to break
human crash test dummies to bits.
What engine drives these irrationalists
who love life so much, yet try to leave it
to serve a punch line? A herd of gleeful know-nothings,
out to thin that self-same herd. “Hey, watch this!”
their likeliest last words,
before demonstrating one more way
that physics won’t be mocked.