Two Poems
Nocturne in which I can’t decide if you should stay in or get out of your car during a thunderstorm
We could have lengthened our year by three hours, improved our float
in a failing atmosphere. As I understand it, you have a nucleus and a head
drawn by hair-like trains across a body of little disturbing influence. I have
to change the locks no matter how many keys are returned, fan my fever
off with four small moons, each of them borrowed. My own electrical fluid
is so remote I have to drag it in by force, pass it through other bodies first, bruise
approaching like an insinuation. Can you feel it here, over the surface? Probably
not. Your transmission is stalled somewhere in a swell and a blur and everyone
in the backseat looks happy. It’s helped me to think of us as kings with two
glass hearts rushing over spaces between stars that looked shorter on the map.
That’s fifty-thousand light years within each rib I didn’t know was there until
you showed me. All that dark matter cannot be met with much resistance.
Where there is no air and you have a choice, I say always drive windows-open.
Higher elevations are pictured in red
Pretend there’s
a distraction
in your chest
that someone
in the next room
is asking how
lemons are preserved.
There is dust under
each opened jar
dust on all mothers
and a ridge that
just keeps going.
You are filled
with birds and
beasts and
creeping things.
A considerable
portion of your
arms are forested
still. With all the good
you do how come
we keep getting
the hiding place wrong?
What you miss most
is still mine
in sickening
abundance. But
hey, listen,
it’s not worth
crying over
a necessity.
By this whalelight
we see our
distortions on
display we
face east and
call ourselves
self-portrait
as listeners as
sisters as
waterers
talking in stones.
Perhaps you
can imagine us
better as an
orchestra breaking
apart. Let’s agree
when we
no longer
evolve
together
we’ll take up
our salt and
alter this landscape
with both wrists
shaking.
Meg Cowen’s first poetry collection, Elastic Shriek Machine, is forthcoming in 2016 from Knut House Press. Some of her recent work appears (or will soon appear) in DIAGRAM, Whiskey Island, Passages North, VECTOR Press, and PANK. She is the founding editor of Pith.