Seven Wedding Summer
Who will I go with when the day ends
and your hands are become envelopes
enclosing letters to the wild drunken wind
of your young love?
When I am left
standing at the shoreline,
the bones of my youth washed skeletal pale,
find me knelt beside the erosion
of what once we shared,
what once you left,
what I stay
and grieve. The many hands that once
wrapped my world will no longer
reach for me first, so I will walk
alone across the wastes, witless
as my name sits honeyed and infantile
on no one’s lips.
I ask this one thing:
to be swallowed whole
as I swallow those
oaths sworn so precious–
so distant from anything like my life.
Resurfacing
When you stop wanting to die,
surface, and open your eyes to the color burst,
the world will be waiting for you, alive.
The water will drain from your ears
and voices ring out like clearest bells
when you stop wanting to die.
You, who have eclipsed yourself,
are held tighter by dawn. When you spit out the night,
the world will be waiting for you. Alive,
you will come inside to a warm room waiting
(after you thought you were unsavable),
when you stop wanting to die.
And it takes time.
But if you give it a chance to be kind,
the world will be waiting for you, alive.
The balloons of your lungs will fill again.
Cut the rope tied round your ankle and let the stone sink.
When you stop wanting to die,
the world will be waiting for you, alive.
not anyone, just everything.
a doe-eyed girl once asked me if i’ve ever been in love and i told her no. but truthfully, i am in love too, with the pool of honey sunlight on the floor that makes me glow big and full like the wagon wheel moon. i am in love with small wiry arms, big tree-branch arms, soft round arms around my neck and heartbeats that skitter around or prowl soft and slow against my ear. i am in love with the rows of marching hemlocks that walk in step with me and January’s white tears that kiss my nose goodnight and tuck me in with a silent, velvet blanket no man could have woven. i am in love with the smudged-ink measures two, four, sixteen bodies write together when they move in chorus to a dum-dum-dum rhythm. i am in love with well-timed jokes, rosy-cheeked belly laughs, silvery giggles, and the rainfall of soft chuckles. i am in love with verdant hills that cradle my body in tender hands, gloved in green and gold. i am in love with the ugly, beautiful, harmonic discord of untrained voices that unwrap themselves and stand bare in front of me without fear of the noise. i am in love with strangers who grow the kindest gardens inside and outside of themselves and give away their best roses for free. i am in love with my grandfather’s speckled leather hands and every purple bruise on them. i am in love with all the wide space in my mind, my open field with room to run as i please, no one standing so big they take up my air. i am in love with birds that fly, uncaged and untethered. and i am in love with the creek, who, whether or not anyone sees her do it or loves her for it, will continue to bubble and laugh.
Anna Meegan is a senior at University of the Cumberlands pursuing a bachelor’s in Integrated Communication with a minor in Creative Writing. She has been writing stories, poems, and songs for as long as she can remember. When she’s not at college, Anna lives with her family in the middle of nowhere outside of Corbin, Kentucky. In her free time, she can be found making art, talking to Jesus, laughing at her own jokes, or frolicking in the woods somewhere.
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