TWO POEMS 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