Rising Writers #3 – Megan Gillett

Sappho

When I first spotted her lounging amongst the grass and rivulets
I presumption combustion, inescapable something would transpire
her legs were lingering, more elongated than mine, not that that’s tricky,
yielding away aloft, olive skin treackling up into her denim shorts
her abdomen was abandoned plane
some epitome of female beauty that couldn’t be held back by weir
she would lark at anything, trickling tongue tracing tributaries, and we concluded bundled together below saplings we seeded around
entwining boughs reached out to our finger tips with buds of fidelity that we didn’t divine, and while we read Sappho and Nabokov to each other the rest of the rivers rolled by
It was once like this.
Like the world had been composed just for us
and though your wave coils changed colour and we took contour
we could still linger in the gurgling gardens and tease touch and nothing would change
It felt regular,
some appease of appeal that too adjacent alliance can, I suppose conceive,
and no one thought it was anything other than what it was to us
which was beauty
and, I guess in a way, love
and the converging meant more than voyaging
but it was just for the kick, the unadulterated, erotic, orgasmic ecstasy
that pitched us together
and then you left for China
and I settled to mind the trees.

 

To The Woodland Goddess

You lay everyplace I cannot go, someplace I cannot be and will never recover you, concession poetry
we are amalgamated though I will never know you
I can recite you off the page, into life, and we will be one
I hurt where you hurt
I cry how you cry
I don’t appeal to die
and I appreciate with means that no one else can ever fathom that blossoms lacerate and blood cures
you encapsulate me somehow
and I’m fractured by that.

the truth that your daddy died and so did mine although I knew him and he murdered himself down a road that ruptured my infant mirrors and I’m constantly searching for him, like you delved for yours
and you paused, as I pause
and we strain to hide from this world together in some liminal form
secreted under asylums, tranquil and tempting,
this is where I’ll find you.

he said ‘we did what poetry told us to do’
it’s so effortless to condemn him, but I discern it’s not his mistake, it’s not your fault, there is no error
except mine
that I reason that somehow we single, when you are wild horse
some sprite in sky space that was ensnared by jealous God
and loosed by jealous man, to be completed slave, because we are indebted to him
so much
we can’t quit him until he cascades into sea, drowns
perchance then we’ll be free.

I read you off the page and no one listens because no one else can see you
pausing there and glistening like some archangel, Lucifer,
they just grasp the holocaust described, so they hide, because it materialised so extensive time ago
it doesn’t count anymore
it doesn’t touch us, although they understood it to be over, so presently, and we think this will be over any day now.
it won’t ensue because ultimately we all want to live
except us
except us, we don’t want to live, not like this, not in this paradigm, we are poets, we belong on other soil where it won’t wound, where bees won’t sting us, knives won’t cut us…
we are all mad,
we all know that, somewhere, somehow,
and some of us just can’t survive. 

you crammed tea towels under their doors and taped them locked
you saved them, you saved us,
then you laid your crown in the kiln, wicked witch fashion, except you weren’t depraved and your enchanted spells were just splendour on sheet,
you read to us,
you spoke to us,
you saved us,
believe me while I place here and everyone else lives, the only purpose I engrave something I don’t want to be heard,
is I hope, upon hope, it will mean something like you did,
like you do…

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