Rachel Lauren Myers
Tidal Disruption Event
This is how to properly unravel. I open a window to let
the light in. Once, my brother and I crept through rooms
with blackout curtains. Sometimes we thought you
would never accept the sun again. Your slumped form
at the end of the sectional. An emptiness where a father
should have been. The darkness of our living room, your
accretion disk, detritus of time stretched spaghetti thin.
Empty bottles behind photographs. A grave for the living,
the living always leaving. Someone found you after
you stopped breathing. You rode to hell hooked
to an ocean of tubes in an ICU with no curtains.
My slumped form at the end of your bed. It took you ten days
to cheat death. Time, the only gift you could give me.
When you opened your eyes, the bright nearly killed you again.
Spring
Interconnectedness makes me nervous. How reflective
the shapes nature makes. How the tree trunks
grow upwards, splitting branches. How the human
circulatory system does the same. Convinced my veins
could become petrified wood. I'll feel it in my feet if
I touch earth. Two rabbits grazing under the window,
where the cardinal died a few months ago. Shock
of red against bright snow. For weeks it lay as if sleeping.
A historic cold snap made for a kind of preservation.
Now the first shoots emerge from the soil. My pale face
under a tepid sun. Inside I know well these bricks and how
they shift. A blank wall for listening can't trick me.
A window for the world outside. I'm not convinced
about any of this. I've built a cage to keep me in.
Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet living in Massachusetts. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle, RESOURCES, ISSUE01, Okay Donkey, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. She is the features editor at MEMEZINE. She almost always marries Shane in every playthrough of Stardew Valley. Catch her on Instagram as @hellostarbuck.