fabric in tribeca
–Megan Fernandes

We are buying curtains to cover up my life.
We are buying patterns to cover up my lethargia.
My sadness is very adult. You can bring it to places
in public and it will not make a scene.
You will not be embarrassed by it.
It will not act out, but only wander, slightly undisciplined.
Look at the red inverted enteric shapes spit across the silk,
endlessly unfolding into our arms. Six dollars for the uneven
pieces. This should do the trick, the leftover cloth that promises
to distort the incoming winter light into something bearable.
Who buys fabric in January?
Who makes curtains to give their sadness a perimeter?

The clerks speak Yiddish and look at us like pregnant dolls,
and we are all here deciphering each other in the drowsy New York afternoon.
Judith says we need to go. She needs to get to Mikveh by 5.
Twenty dollars to be cleansed.
The monthly baptism for women who bleed, for women who carry.
Even now, inside her, the baby is stirring to the ring of our voices,
the underwater radio where everyone sounds like they are choking.

I think she’ll be a tomboy and extend her childhood across
the universe, a little gender deviant for the stars.
All that matters is if you’re Jewish, the owner says and I smile
and press the yellow linen to my face.
We need to go, Judith repeats. I need to be clean.
I look at my treasures, neatly folded, and wonder if I am
talented enough to do anything worthwhile with these hands.

Calypso in Paris
–Megan Fernandes

It is a hideous November—

even your
indifference

takes a blue form.

You are for the new world,
tomorrow.

I, for America, today.

Your apartment is cold
and I search your kitchen

for napkins

as you bite into
a late night animal.

You wake

to tell me
about a dream

of us eating out

someone
together.

I want to ask

but don’t.
I have given myself

seven hours of flight

to bring
my halves back

as one—

though the body is a dull metaphor,
won’t quite line up.

Part of me

has already
departed,

the other, sits

motionless,
blows ash off the windowsill

and small curls

of burning paper
descend,

doomed
for the fruit stands below.

It is a hideous November—

birds glide down the canal,
strings

of city wires

slope like hills, fluid
and tapered

by wind.

 

What Will You Miss About the Earth?
–Megan Fernandes
That it spun.
That everything was a portrait of gravity.

The smell of a new body, newly close,
ready to love.

 

from The Poet Holds a Gun
–Megan Fernandes

The bullet is a simple, adolescent heartache.
When guns go off around you, you wince like a single sheet
and nothing in your body has ever been so simultaneous
not even orgasm which is more like the hungry sea
meeting an Aeolian beach with their sweet
caper storms and lemon trees. An orgasm
has more surface area and salt than a gun.