Apartment 3
by Merrill Oliver Douglas
They shared a room
so narrow that from twin beds
pushed to opposite walls,
a girl could reach into
her sister’s dream and take
what she needed:
once
a dollar
once
a lipstick
once
a furred animal
drained of its life
to drape on the collar
of a black cloth coat,
glass eyes glued
in arrow-shaped head,
tail caught in a steel clip
where teeth would have been.
Merrill Oliver Douglas is the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Cimarron Review, Comstock Review and The Briar Cliff Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Apartment 3”? I’d been thinking about the apartment in Brooklyn where we used to visit my grandmother when I was small. Growing up there, my two aunts had shared a tiny bedroom, while my father slept in the living room until he went off to serve in World War II. I’d originally meant to put my father in the poem, too. Did he sleep on the couch? Where did he keep his clothes, school books, baseball mitt? (Did he have a baseball mitt?) But my aunts and their shared room asserted themselves. My father will have to wait for his chance in another poem.
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Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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