On her annual quest to Taos, JoJo the Poet’s soul
by Karla Linn Merrifield
sopped up Puebloan vibes like so much spilled
iced lattes, musing how What is past or passing
is to come, an idea whose Native American time
had taught long before Yeats copped it;
trouble was Jesus the Penitente kept
scourging himself in her midnight mind’s
eye— So JoJo’d no choice but to smudge
sage through the cortex’s casita consigning
the extremist’s spirit to his afterlife in Hollywood,
leaving Jill and her pal Pi to obtain the mountain.
Karla Linn Merrifield has had 1000+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 15 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her newest poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, recently nominated for the National Book Award, was inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars and published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series (Rochester, NY). She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review. Web site: https://www.karlalinnmerrifield.org/; blog at https://karlalinnmerrifeld.wordpress.com/; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel.
Red Wolf Journal 