TWO POEMS by Megan Peak

/ / Issue 4, Poetry

 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

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