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Poems

Two Poems

By Meghan Maguire Dahn ·

In Consideration of My Best Efforts

There are many reasons I cannot sleep —
among them, the percussion of what I can do
versus what I cannot.  I have been breaking pecans,

magnificently, all week.  I have been enamored
with the most shallow of thoughts.  I have remained

unaware of the housefly and the gnat, hungry

and approaching my left side.  My instructor suggests
I try to breathe through my eyes only, knowing
their permeability.  I begin to consider my eyes the best

nesting place for the insects I have captivated.
I waiver when I value the goodness of the world
to be less than my own failures.  No one has spoken

of the hidden things to me! I break my own heart
and reparations, when I make them, will disappoint.
If my failings involve trapping moths under the eves

on my way to bed, rather than some machination
of my own contrivance, what I mean is I have done
disservice to the dignity of love.

Viscosity

            Glassy eel of doubt, in the morning
I did too little, unaccustomed to exposure

as a means of preservation.  When I took you
in my hands I tore you up and lost my hope.

            Eel of doubt at midday, when you made
your way through wet grass I laughed

for you and you wrapped your ventricle vein
around me.  I began to suspect

my island was a place to build a life
for us, without trains or commerce.

Only barges ever passed by us
bearing winter’s salt in mountains and in heaps.

            Silver eel of evening, by the glaucous hour
I had reversed my stance.  The water and the sky

took prominence and my footing
was on nothing in between.  My patience

had grown bare.  When I looked at the houses
across the bank, I saw them swelter in their goodness.

            I know how I must look to you.
If you suggest I’ve made the bed wrong

I’ll believe you.  I’ll go for a walk,
welcome the affection of the neighbor’s cat.

When I make the map of us, my long doubt,
I will lay you down feldgrau, without water,

use you as my scale.  For someone who knows
what is right, I have a lot of trouble

acting decently without distance.

 

____________

Image by SC Cunningham

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Meghan Maguire Dahn

Meghan Maguire Dahn grew up in the middle of the woods.  Her first poem was published in Highlights Magazine and read primarily in waiting rooms by children nervous about getting shots or stitches. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, The Boog City Reader, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cartographer, and ellipsis…a journal of art and culture.  She is a winner of a 2014 Discovery/92nd Street Y Poetry Prize, has an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and lives steps away from Manhattan’s only forest.

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We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.

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