Cloud Sanctum [A Letter to My Daughter], by Marcus Myers

Poetry, chapbook, 52 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A feverish letter to kid and world written during a cancer scare, stored in the cloud, which is figured as a shifting imaginary construct in this sequence of poems, conceptualized both as a digital Cornell Box and an egg, about the shockingly inherent (and inherited) difficulties of living and parenting well within this single lifetime.

Each of us will one day have to leave the corporeal body, of course. And the speaker knows this marrow-deep as he inventories a few already-fading objects housed in memory’s reliquary. And still, as our planet threatens to tap the delete button on our species and many others, the speaker delights in how language expressing love and compassion gives the body salve in the present, and how it might just survive us, though disembodied, in the sanctum of the digital archive.

Originally from Hot Springs, Arkansas, Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches and serves as a co-founding editor of Bear Review. A semifinalist in the 2019, 92nd Street Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest, his poems have appeared in The Common, The Cortland Review, The Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry South, RHINO, Salt Hill, Tar River Poetry, TYPO, Windfall Room, and elsewhere.