Ripening
mother was our madness
and our curves
even her silhouettes were silver
mother could grow marigolds
in November
she was our snake charmer
our static cling
(Previously published in the Mother’s Day 2014 issue of Broad!)
Little Punk
The wrathful kid with the fierce fingers
and a penchant for torturing ants won’t
stop breaking eggs on the sidewalk,
won’t respond to the vigilant old lady
shouting from across the street in the
kooky green house with lace for blinds.
He splatters the eggs like a delirious Picasso
from four or five cartoons I’m sure his mother
will miss. I think his father works twelve hours
a day, six days a week, in some nearly-extinct
job better left to computers who don’t have
two mortgages out on some disfigured dark
eyesore with a leaf-choked lawn and a tornado-
prone roof which blocks out the sunrise.
I think his mother cleans the kitchen counter
twenty times a day. The trampoline sags
like a heartless sonnet. The basketball net
unthreads in self-pity. Splat!
Now there are no more eggs to scramble in
silent, screaming testaments, and the kid
heads home for another sapless sandwich
of a supper.
(Previously published in the April 2014 issue of Deep South Magazine)
Color-Coded & Iridescent
You dress in dogwood rose,
claret, jungle green;
chisel Chinese violet
out of bones and ebony.
I found a scribbled sonnet
inside your june bud jeans,
saw the way you danced in Venice,
your lines a sleek, sweet cream.
Your eyes could be a landscape,
its sky every shade of blue.
The instant when your heart stood still:
the most fuschia part of you.
(Previously published in the Spring 2013 issue of Obsessed With Pipework)
Distance
I allowed you
to sail me over lakebeds,
pull me up cliffs,
across broken bridges.
But I could not kiss you
with any trace of thunder,
even when the sun was
sinking into so many oceans.
You told me once
that there would never be
enough sky, but always,
always too many stars.
You wished you could
count them with your heart.
Love was the sacks
of luminous, worthless stones
you made me carry
up and down
blue mountains.
(Previously published in the Fall 2012 issue of Digital Americana under “Megan Hall.”)
the darkest art
cackling sonnets
inside every snare
spectral sunfalls
beneath roaring hale
unleashing calamity
these most ambrosial
of refrains
rabid moonbeats
become fancy
become flight
bloodless zion
cradled in
precarious constellations
seething grave
of gehenna
beckons
with a boil
withered wildflower witches
live on
to lament
our wintered woes
sing siren-soft melodies
into blacksmith night
hearts ablaze
as pillared wax
dripping
sonnets
on fir splinters
windows polish
into prisms
yawning moonlight
breaking open
in the daze
between black shores
upon perfumed elms
windless waters
still remembered
from the moments
we were faultless
undiminished
in the eyes
of any god
To Whomever Listens Here
I will sustain for you in consecrated constraint,
tethered to this slatted kitchen door.
There are lesser visions, I am certain,
in your more honest reflections of me.
Where will you wait for me
when the yellow dahlias have finished
spinning into dawn?
There are never too many echoes or footfalls between us.
deployed
emily was right about you
from the peril and speck of jade
in your scrutiny
(boozer flatfoot, a flair for us floozies)
to the way you yield your demonic seduction
in the murky, stained, disheveled moments
(where she and I cannot exist together)
Relics
memorize me
in the slanted dawn
of your attic,
taking pictures
with my heart
unfind me
in the quatrain mist
outside the coffee trees
open up
the farmlit skies
shaking with the sea
lose me
in the newborn dimmet,
unlearn me in your cream
lie stiller
than a peony
bashful in the breeze
shed the solace
wrapped around
the bases of your bones:
autumnal afghans, freesia fleece
put away
those lost engravings
from your father
read to me
the only outcast star
in the tide
strike wilder
than a daisy
dining on its shade
conjure poems
from your sinew,
making all the right mistakes
mockings, midnights
the lion wants
what it still has
the warlord cat
it bides its cream
this sideshow
sun-starched calloused cleave
merciless minions
spread freelove venom
borneo black plague asps
we report paper cuts
and piranhas
us fragile inner city bees
i didn’t hollow
this canyon
between us
i didn’t carve it
from a dream
we meet at three ends
romancing embers
into echoes
so many heartbeats
later
you devour
lilac locust breeze
silicone sonnet sundae shade
baskets of billabongs
trapped in your bass
dreaming of frequencies
in the next lane
you never failed
in the phase
you waned
it only matters
when the moon is
unrehearsed
unexplained
electrifying snowflakes
branding bullets
with your everlasting
examining
our apparition
it flies solo
at the seams
shadowing a village
it pebbles
at our feet
we forget
we forgot our every father
somewhere they trace
themselves
back to the tide
somewhere they lose
their opals
in the maze
try try try
we could never
jump-start skies
treason
your lone infatuation
mocking the martyrs
of the blaze
loose chantings
from our fingertips
the only part
of you
i take with me
into coal mines
past the bombs
wherever you flee
i feel your limerick
in my bones
however you undo
i find the starset
in my tree
Mapping
we finished in callous calligraphy
what we never felt the need to do
heart to heart
fire to frenzy to fracture
there were vast, luscious moments
we will remember in
agave Antigua whispers
Bavarian bread crumbs
winter-capped Norse summits
bleeding blue lyrics on Baltic beaches
crawling through granite and Greenland
deflowering Irish violet lullabies and
English rose sonnets in our shrieking wake
you manifested the anonymous almond shores
where I will one day overture my soul
these posturing postcards
will be our postscripts
those Nova Scotia steamship whitetips
our final coup de grace
***
Megan Mealor has been writing stories since she was three years old. Dozens of her poems and short fiction have been featured in such publications as Digital Americana, Hello Horror, Belle Reve Literary Journal, and Better Than Starbucks. She is currently working on her first chapbook, Bipolar Lexicon, as well as a full-length royal romance novel entitled My Lady Mercedes. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida with her fiancé, three-year-old son, and two black-and-white cats.
