by Anna Meister after Catherine Barnett this one here with the shit-smeared sidewalks and the bottle of cheap white emptied and the migraine’s blooming and the lack of overage protection and the inclement weather affecting my commute and the losses already suffered, the more I just can’t handle and the two cats chasing tails and every green thing in the fridge going, gone, the body only wanting what I cannot ask for and the body sexless as a Sunday and the elevator broken and the hope in a higher dosage and the tulips tossed and the rain that traps me, the trains that trap me and the night smacked into, the question, lack of evidence and the too casual kill-yourself joke like eggs floating the way they do and the pushing past what I am capable of and the mouth mouthing purpose and the forgetting, the whatever of it and the body by the bridge or the implied erasure of the body like when they say just stay alive and the prayers I’m kept or not kept in and the worsening, the visiting hours and the board games with the missing pieces and the missing and the light caught, the thick drapes and the vital signs taken and the three square meals and the applesauce, the weak coffee and the pellet shits and the names for feelings, names for pills, lack of hooks and hangers, the brown paper bags— Anna Meister is author of the chapbook NOTHING GRANTED (dancing girl press, 2016) & holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she served as a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Offing, Big Lucks, Tinderbox, The Arkansas International, & elsewhere. Anna was a 2015 Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow & 2017 National Poetry Series finalist. She lives in Des Moines, IA & at www.anna-meister.com.
1 Comment
garth
12/22/2017 05:31:21 am
This is wonderful, I love it. Thank you.
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