Karla Linn Merrifield

Bio: Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 900+ 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 book 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; the book is slated to be published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series (Rochester, NY). Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye. She is a member of Just Poets (Rochester, NY), the Florida State Poetry Society, the New Mexico Poetry Society, and The Author's Guild. Web site: https://klmerrifield.wpengine.com/; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.

Plastidon inexpectatus

in Six Mile Cypress Slough

The skink emerges slowly, red nose, red throat, but like five-lined thunderon a log, squatting low, throbbinglizard of a poem, five-lined,red, red, read of the spawn, this thunder.

Scherzi Diptych

1. Softshell Turtle Habitat
Mud is my comforter; I shall not want for cover.


2. Supplication to the Hawai’ian Parrotfish
Eat coral. Shit sand.Repeat, repeat to build our beach.

Avian Rainbow through Binoculars

Scarlet macaw colors this worldas does emerald toucan, orange-chinned parrot, and yellow-crownedeuphonius sipping a fuchsia bromeliad.
You traipse over shallow root systemsfor a glimpse of violet-saberwing hummingbirds.You zip by in a Zodiac on choppyPacific seas for blue-footed boobies.
But to find the gold at rainbow’s end,you’ll have to fly with me throughthe Costa Rican rainforestof my moist imagination where
I may show you this recently identifiedspecies. Rare? No. Extinct? Yes.At the end of the rainbow flies the indigoghost bird of the clouds of Monteverde.

After Birdwatching: Stargazing in Central America

Some birds I first enumerated in Amazonia, now orbit me independently again in Costa Rican cloud forests, in Panama rain forests like so many solar light-collectors arrayed in outer space around a tropical star where I survive as human at the bright center of an avian Dyson sphere woven in wingèd light by circling yellow-rumped caciques, yellow-rumped caracaras, and greater and lesser kiskadees of glowing yellow breasts. Raucously the gilded illuminated icons welcome me home to our native galaxy, another rara avis of the Milky Way’s wet seasons.
In tonight’s déjàvu, the Universe spins onyellow-spun feathers.

“Adaptability”: Lessons from Costa Rica


The red-eyed tree frog has adapted,climbing cecropias on padded toes.Colleen has adaptedto walking with two fused ankles.
The spectacled caiman has adapted,gorging on feral hoglets.Laury, sans Ruth, has adaptedto swallow a widow’s life.
The resplendent quetzal has adaptedto breeding in remnant forests.Child-bride Boodley has adaptedto loving her old husband’s last neurons.
But, honestly, most have forgottenwe are only animals; most won’t adapt.

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