Poems: Telecaster/Doldrums

Lost in the dimly lit

blackness of a backwater

bar, abandoned

by its owner, a guitar

gently wept. Though she

had forgotten the sound

of blues, they were

all she played, alone in

a fraying and forgotten case.

Her pearly white pickguard

was obscured by a mud

colored mess of old blood,

as if when played

the sound bled out

and dripped down the strings –

though she had no strings,

except one: a mangled

rusted wreck. When my

fingers found her, she

trembled, her frets

fumbling, having forgotten

a loving touch. But when

cleaned and restrung, she

recalled every song she’d ever sung,

an old beauty emerging:
alder, maple, chrome,

and a tone so supple

you’d never know she once

lived alone. Like a sinner

once mute but who now can sing

she asks: what if this harmony

sleeps beneath the surface

of all abandoned things?

She didn’t feel happy anymore

but pain had abandoned her too, so she stumbled,

numb and dazed, through days that fumbled their way

into mourning. Mostly, she said, her ship

slept adrift in an endless lull of seas.

I told her that seas periodically freeze,

that trade winds would descend again

to push her toward the shore.

You’re wrong. These doldrums run deeper

than your winds or words can cure.

Each day passes the same: ships sail by

where the horizon crashes against the sky

while she grows sun-blind, her mouth silent and dry,

cursing the winds as time passes her by.

Michel Lee Garrett (”me-shell” // she/her) is a crime fiction author and Pennsyltucky poet. She has worked as an investigative journalist, the communications director of a U.S. Senate campaign, the chair of an advocacy focused LGBT+ non-profit, and the speechwriter to the president of a major research university. She is the author of the crime fiction collection “Born a Ramblin’ Man: Fourteen Tales of Thieves, Killers, Vagabonds, and Lost Souls“ (Shotgun Honey, 2025) and the editor of “Transcendent Love: True Stories of T4T Relationships“ (forthcoming, JKP Books, 2027), the first book from a major publisher to chronicle relationships between trans people in their own words. When she’s not writing, Michel can be found at local punk shows, cheering at women’s hockey games, and rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates. She lives in Central Pennsylvania with her wife and two kids. Find her online at leegarrett.net.

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