Why can’t I remember
the day I stopped wanting her?
That’s a rhetorical question,
I know why.
The newspaper said today
some generals were giving up
a fight and I am too,
I am carving out my years
from the compost heap
where I shoveled my potential
like it was nothing,
like I was nothing.
When you love someone
from a distance for too long,
you forget it’s the being loved
that people write songs about,
it’s being known and desired,
not hiding in a bear cave
under a cover of thick snow.
I’ve no right to say her name,
anymore, but why do I want to?
That’s a rhetorical question,
I know why.
Can’t you feel the air is different,
now the earth shakes
where I step and
I don’t believe in God anymore,
and when you spend long enough
reading about the worst genes
in your inherited legacy,
you forget about joy sometimes.
I know I wasn’t brave enough
to let her see me,
I chose to leave her
but she was the one
who chose not to say goodbye.
meg pendergast
This morning I was a miracle,
a foretold miracle
but I didn’t believe it
until I felt its pain
and the miracle was freedom.
Gods and immortal beings,
they don’t understand miracles,
because you have to face death
to understand what it means,
for your sentence to be deferred,
to be saved by a stranger.
The best miracles hurt,
they make you feel small
and alone in the universe,
but together with everyone
who feels that way too,
connected by fragility
and wonder and hope.
I know you don’t believe
in miracles anymore,
and that’s okay,
I can believe for both of us.
meg pendergast
Susanne Charlotte Winther - Two Women, 2020
Danish, b.?
Watercolour on paper
There wasn’t anything larger
in the grief, it filled me up but
it didn’t make me any bigger,
just angry and distracted,
it pushed out my memories
of you and of before when
I had romantic ideas about
disaster being a learning
experience and not erosion,
not destruction and ending.I wanted to find a reason for it
so I looked for buds in spring,
to prove I was growing and
there were still green things
but I was so much smaller
than I remembered, and even
with lungs filled and chest high,
oh, when I tried to shout out,
my voice, it was nothing more
than a sparrow in a hurricane.meg pendergast
I can’t get you off of me,
you’re an oil slick
and I can’t wash my hands clean,
I can’t exfoliate my frontal cortex,
no, I still feel you when I think you’ve gone—
I’ll see your name
or an old joke of ours,
and you burrow into my guts
like a neutron splits apart matter
when its ending the world.
Maybe if you had never existed
and I didn’t either,
maybe then I wouldn’t feel your absence,
your Sharpie wouldn’t be
scribbled across my bedroom door,
with an indentation
you can only get
from the impossible weight
of a maybe and a please and a never.
How would you feel
if I offered you something lovely
but I held it out of reach,
I crushed it in my palm
when you asked for it?
I don’t think we’re meant
to live in the bottom of a well
with glass walls
and a bucket reaching down
every morning to offer a bit of hope,
just enough to make it
until tomorrow.
meg pendergast
![richardsikendaily:r-siken:
wishbone, richard siken
[text ID: here we are at the place where I get to beg for it /end ID] #poetry#quotes#not mine](https://64.media.tumblr.com/a8130ec7ad6688778195a2db1631286b/tumblr_pqhd89Eh2J1wenic7o1_500.png)
r-siken :
wishbone, richard siken
[text ID: here we are at the place where I get to beg for it /end ID]
It’s simple,
we’ll play hopscotch together
and make mud pies by the creek,
I promise we’ll go out dancing
and it’ll be so light maybe we take flight,
maybe we run
before someone teaches us
what happens to girls who stay out too late.
You can count on me holding your arm
when we walk to get cheesy chips,
when we fall into twin beds
separated by a gulf,
pulled apart by whatever
the opposite of gravity is,
maybe I’ll send you jokes
and you’ll flirt back,
even though you have a boyfriend
and we’re not that.
I heard there was math
before there were people,
that it was here before us
and will be here after
but we think it cares about us,
we fuck it up trying to analyze the beauty
in a moment of eye contact,
in the derivative of us,
but I promise it’s simple,
I promise I’ll be there
every time you want to go back and can’t,
baby, I won’t leave
because I can’t.
So tell me you love me,
tell me about a miracle
that makes you wake up smiling,
because God is in daydreams
and goodbyes and afternoons
where we don’t do anything,
and I won’t feel guilty
about my potential or my scars,
tell me you’ll be there
if we lie under a blue sky one day
far too long,
tell me you’ll stick around
longer than my sunburn.
meg pendergast
Seville, the Dance, 1915, Joaquín Sorolla
Medium: oil,canvashttps://www.wikiart.org/en/joaqu-n-sorolla/seville-the-dance-1915
We’re digging a well
in the soft earth beneath the house,
we are trying to reach the bones
of our ancestors,
the ones who would spit
in our faces if they could,
and I’d cut my tongue out
and live silently if I thought
you could make better use of it me.
We carried ourselves
up mountains with round bodies,
through streets cut by razors,
under a sun that burned like hellfire
with only my own faith in you
to protect me,
to shield us from the fear
that was born in my spine one day,
although I can’t remember it taking root.
You always liked boats,
maybe the same way I love
the dream of freedom and escape,
and I haven’t lived in your grave
but I have a jar of soil
on my bedside table
to remind me that our pain
is born screaming from a placenta,
it’s written on chalkboards
and whispered over picket fences.
No one taught me to hate myself
but I guess everyone did,
seeding lies in silence and shame
before I was old enough
to carry a shield and a torch for myself,
and maybe we’re still
lost in the labyrinth,
following a twisted red thread
past every dead end and obituary,
but you know something?
We’re laying a path for others to follow.
meg pendergast
Maybe we were dead all along.
There’s a ghost with my face looking back
at me in the mirror and I close my eyes.
No one teaches the plant to unfurl its leaves,
but still they launch skywards fully formed
as the devote offer prayers to empty space.
Oh, that’s how it was to meet you:
curling towards your light like a blind man
lifts his head to the warmth of the sun.
Maybe there was only ever one fall,
happening over and over and the devil felt
the same panic as I do descending into you.
And you know,
it’s a sin to say it out loud but
they tried to kill me and they did kill us.
Then I learned,
you can get away with murder if
there’s no one left alive to tell the truth.
![richardsikendaily:r-siken:
love from a distance, richard siken
[text ID: (The body always betrays itself - it blushes, it trembles…) /end ID] #quotes#poetry#not mine](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6cebbe167828e2e89e760973efe140cf/tumblr_pptp83LtqY1wenic7o1_500.png)
r-siken :
love from a distance, richard siken
[text ID: (The body always betrays itself - it blushes, it trembles…) /end ID]
A vine climbed down my throat this morning,
and when I carved her name
on the wall of the cave,
no one saw and there were only shadows,
there were only shadows and a tightness
and a panic and a dream.When I saw the world it was like
the bottom of a frond,
whose blood is my blood,
it was like a stick figure who walked
upright for the first time,
and in my neck there was
a noble steed carrying a madman.She saw my shadow and I watched hers,
and I felt we were two fish
trying to imagine the heavens,
or I were a hero pursued
by cruel giants no one else could see.It was her or me, and so I let the vine
strangle me this morning,
I cut out my heart and set it
in a dark closet and burned it down,
I turned out all the lights in the cave,
and that was the end of sanity.
We forget now,
I’ve read enough history to know
this is when the forgetting happens.
This is when
we go to have each memory
surgically burned away with a laser.
I know graffiti,
it pokes through layers of paint
like rotting hands reach through soil.
What is forgetting,
except a conspiracy between strangers?
It’s an unspoken promise to never speak.
Already I melt,
I say something honest accidentally
and wither under questioning stares.
And you know,
it’s a sin to say it out loud but
they tried to kill me and they did kill us.
Then I learned,
you can get away with murder if
there’s no one left alive to tell the truth.
meg pendergast
cut-up magazines with vintage pin-up girls,
a basement bar with a Friday night Jell-O shot deal.My dear, it’s the in-between moments I remember,
it’s us wrapped in blankets in your kitchen
eating lemon curd toasties and I thought
you were so beautiful I would die,
I still do, but we had an agreement
and the terms were clear:
to forget each other after, and
that’s why I pretended not to
recognize you when you walked into
that café on a date with someone else,
like you weren’t nervous when you held my hand
a few nights before, or like you hadn’t
been inside me.Baby, you didn’t owe me anything but you still
kissed her right in from of me,
right on the dance floor with the
sequins and the stickiness and the
steady thumping from somewhere inside,
and I lied to you with my feet pinned to the floor
and my heart flying far away
and my throat cut in half,
but I’m not dumb enough to think I was
anything but a background actress,
and I hope you had a good night
after I left.Darling, it makes my stomach itch to think
about me leaning against your desk,
a laugh like you were the sun and I was a sin,
and I was trying to hide my feelings, as if
that were a thing a person could do,
as if I could lock up my heart on a rocky island
and send you away, but they must have
seen how I danced with you,
how you spilled your drink and
my eyes dropped to your waist
just a moment too long and too sad to be friends,
still burning so long and so desperate I cried
when I walked home, with our pizza
in my belly.But my heart snaps back like a running cartoon
Tom cat smacked with a frying pan,
thinking somehow of my aunt’s neighbor who
kept replacing the koi fish that the neighborhood racoons
ate but she was just feeding them, and the
loneliness is its own obsession and I’m its disciple,
but some ugly fires just grow the more
you try to put them out, and I heard
a story about a lighthouse where I could stay
forever, which isn’t so very long after all,
and not nearly so lonely as
dancing with you.mp
Garden of Spanish Farmhouse, 1909, Joaquín Sorolla
Medium: oil,canvas
The sun paused for a moment,
a red-hot coal sinking
through smoldering tinder
like an animal falls asleep
without even realizing it.
Warm light dripped tie-dye paint
upon the hills, as shadows fell
over a multitude of empty branches
grasping at silent birds,
their fingers cast heavenwards.
All was still for a heartbeat,
and the universe leaned over
to whisper in my ear,
“This is the design,
and you are the mistake.”
meg pendergast
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