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dancing girl press, 2013
$7.00 |
Meghan Brinson recieved her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Arizona State University in 2008. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fragrant Inferno and Broken Plums on the Sidewalk. Meghan is a second year MA candidate in English at Georgetown University. She lives in Washington DC with her husband, a major in the United States Air Force, and their young sons. She has had poems appear in Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, Gulf Coast, and The Greensboro Review, among others. She blogs about feminism and poetics at http://meghanbrinson.weebly.com
The Flesh Eaters (1952), William Baziotes
My eyes keep going back to the silhouette, the fuzzy cutout, the body
described most keenly as the threat of erasure.
A charcoal sediment stands in for human shoulders and neck—
ashes—where hair should be, distinct only where they touch the organ pink nebula.
I know I am the organ and you are the white gash
that is losing itself.
Over on the left, that blue curl, awkward hominid separated from us by the moment of his birth, which has not yet happened.
Fixed in our minds, this craggy lilac mountain range, or river, this obstacle of topography.
I know I am the organ of connection, the only place you two shadows touch.
Swollen as a spring pond, legs akimbo, represented by the alien pink haze of light being filtered through my own body, the estrangement.
Why does he wear waterboots? Why does he furrow his brow? Why does he have a water lily for an eye? Long spidery petals trace out like tears, Little boy blue.
I can’t touch your dark envelope, husband, or the watery hiccups of our son’s fetal heart monitor sessions.
I cannot touch you.
But the stark white tentacle of you cut out of us, glaring out of our little triumvirate. It reaches right into my esophagus and catches there.