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FOUR WAY REVIEW

Megan Peak currently lives in Columbus, Ohio and is enrolled in The Ohio State University’s MFA program. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in A cappella Zoo, The Bakery, The Boiler, DIAGRAM, PANK, Pleiades, Stone Highway Review, and THRUSH Poetry Journal.

TWO POEMS by Megan Peak

Thursday, 14 November 2013 by Megan Peak

 BOTANIST’S ELEGY

                                                                —In your bed, I lie
open to all the ways you have me: husked, sown, ruined.
You hover above, right hand burgeoning like a mushroom,
white, trembling. Outside the pine seeds slip from their cones,
plummet toward the ground. After you strike, I don’t try
to articulate the awful lull; instead, I close my eyes, blood-
banked, soldered, and consider how we classify seeds
not unlike love: by exodus, by arrival. Flowers, too,
with their explosions and repose. I’ve seen their exit wounds,
their hard births in the soil. I’ve seen myself here before,
between your fist and our sheets. Still, I unfold for you,
ask you to unshut all my parts, not just the soft ones, ask
if this is the point in a marriage when open means defeat.
Seeds burst against the roof above us. You say you’re the worst
kind of flower. I say I am no better; I say I am the vine
climbing up your leg as you hack away. 

 

TIME LAPSE OF A YOUNG WOMAN

At low angle
my body resembles
                                         a drum
fire-struck. A box

            dumb and splayed.

The skin above
my eye twitches—
                                      fast-flailed,
                                      ruin-rubbed,
                                      shut, shut.

Every three minutes
a windmill                 stutters.

To be a woman
is to be                      unfoldable—
                                     a box and
                                     another box.

All the gods’ spears
                                    tear: through: me.

Underneath the old trains,
dawn flinches

               between railroad joints. 

A dull box
                on the roadside
                               shudders in the wind.

From a ditch
                                    my heart
                                    sends up         
                                    a flare.

As in: let me snarl, let me knot.

In the sky the last scar is a woman, cut
open before morning.

 

 

 

Issue 4 Contents                                       NEXT: The Shatter of Birds by Javier Zamora

Botanist's ElegyFour Way ReviewMegan PeakTime Lapse of a Young Woman
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  • Published in Issue 4, Poetry
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