Victoria Lynne McCoy

Victoria Lynne McCoy holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Used Furniture Review, PANK, Union Station Magazine, and the anthology Best New Poets 2012. She is a member of the louderARTS Project and was the 2011 and 2012 Frost Place Poetry Work Fellow. A Southern California native, Victoria now lives in Brooklyn and works in small press publishing.

AUBADE IN PIECES by Victoria Lynne McCoy

Sunday, 30 September 2012 by Victoria Lynne McCoy

Even as I deliver my body
to the subway’s tenebrous mercy,
I cannot un-know this:

each time daylight invades
our limbs, the sun marching
its restless armies up the sheets,
my love will put entire states between us
and there’s no telling
when the map will tesseract
itself to bring him back.

Always his breath that first
breaks me. His chest a hum
of lightning bugs. Lethal
little darlings. His fingers
swarm my thighs. He leaves
teeth prints to miss him by—

Praise this skin
its miracle cells, their blessed
forgetfulness.

Under my pillow, a mason jar
where I collect my name
each time it burns his mouth
open, fireflies
in the summer porch of him.

I pin their wings down.

I sing to them of the hour
before the wolf comes.

Listen to Victoria Lynne McCoy’s reading of “Aubade in Pieces” below…