After the Miracle Season: poems by Melissa Atkinson Mercer. Number 7 in Volume Three of the Seven Kitchens Press Editor’s Series, this collection explores intertwining familial narratives of physical and mental health. We are thrilled to publish this chapbook and are huge fans of Melissa’s other works–please do check those out as well. 

Publication:  September 29, 2018 [100 copies]
30 pages
$ 9.00

Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of the poetry collections Knock (Half Mystic Press, 2018) and Saint of the Partial Apology (Five Oaks Press, 2017) as well as five chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Moon City Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Yes, Poetry, and A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Identity, Gender, and Bodies, among others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University where she won the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She currently works and teaches at Lees-McRae College.

River Road North

Brother, if you must speak, sew a wolf’s tooth under your left arm.
If you must run, thread your skirt with fish scales.

The witches here are patient as caves.

They carry knives between their lungs, a rebuke in their ribs.
The sophic hearts of baby goats

hum water-level. You, too, will curse yourself with prudence.

You, too, will weary leading
the black-foot oxen again from your father’s fields—take now

their noses in your hands, their grain upon your own immortal back.

• Purchase After the Miracle Season here.
• Purchase Ghost Exhibit from Glass Poetry Press.
• Purchase Saint of the Partial Apology from Five Oaks Press.
• Purchase Knock from Half Mystic Press.