Marcus Myers
Depression Story
When I began
to sing, I sang to newts
& moccasins down
by the stream
that hollowed
a womb for the death
of green time from limestone.
I came to know this dynamic
as sublime, the word
a five-dollar bill
I stole from the purse
of my mother’s
pretty pink mouth
and folded into memory.
The days have run through
the sinkhole behind
the thread of light
like loose rock,
like refrigerator
& car doors, trash
made beautiful
when illustrated
in the karst schematic
I’d internalized
from the water-
damaged K
Britannica volume
I’d retrieved
from the long flush
of books
on the lowest shelf
in Motorcycle Man’s
trailer, where kids dropped
in for free smokes
& expired
fruit pies.
As rainwater vanished
into the failing stream
where it entered
beneath the junkyard,
I sang in the vapors,
to the scales
& fur
& feathers
of storied beasts who’d heard
plenty a sad song leaned against
nothingness. I sang of us
teens as wanting,
blemished, upright figures
of the hydraulic
cycle, whose diurnal
escape from parents
and their hyper-sensitivities
to success & failure
became a hypo mode
of survival,
& yet
I did not, like the cottonmouths,
believe I owned
the flow or drip
of the porous
water-clock.
Yet I made a cave’s mouth
a home there, a space known
to the airborne BMXers
as a sweet fort,
& when they winged in
from berm & ramp
mud-knobbed & mullet-sweaty
for inspection, I clenched
my teeth at first
& did not say
a single word,
much less sing
about the packrat’s midden
of smokes & mags
& prophylactics
they gathered there. A dude
with tobacco mouth
& wet-cinder eyes
checked the sun
against his hand & hills,
said I had best leave
their shit be
or they would cram
my scrawny-ass self
even deeper
into the throat
of this god-
forsaken holler.
Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches and serves as the founding and managing editor of Bear Review. Author of the chapbook Cloud Sanctum (2022), his poems have appeared in The Common, The Florida Review, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, RHINO, Southeast Review, and other such journals.
Banner Art:
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, 2025
