Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2016! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections.
Today’s featured poet is Meghan Privitello, who won the Spring 2015 Black River Chapbook Competition with her manuscript Notes on the End of the World, which is due out this fall.
Day 9
.
When I come home, my husband says
I think I married a witch.
He’s watching old movies on the old movie channel,
and I can’t blame him for trying to shove his life
into a simple story that dogs, in their colorblindness,
can understand.
When the world ends, I will assume what he said is true.
That my skin is made of magic, that I can turn any tragedy
into a swan.
This means that when the sky is a black tumor
that is hungry for more than a solitary breast,
I will turn it into licorice.
Old men and women will eat through it and say
Dear childhood, you are loyal, you have never left us.
This means when the earth cracks open and tries
to swallow us like pills, I will hypnotize it into thinking
people are made of arsenic and bleach until it stops.
My husband tells me I am a combination
of Veronica Lake and Clara Bow, which means
I am in love with whiskey and faulty hearts,
that I do not fear death any more than I fear
rocking horses and ringlets.
When the world ends, I will be trying to turn
light bulbs into hollow stars.
When the world ends, I will be curling my hair
with my husband’s burning hands.
I will be on the back of a horse as if I am riding
towards some sort of ending.
______________________________
Meghan Privitello is the author of A New Language for Falling Out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015) and the forthcoming chapbook Notes on the End of the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). Work has appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Best New Poets, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, & elsewhere. She is the recipient of a NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
