Meghan Privitello
The Birth of Love
If you are always red-lit, who will see that your body is one giant flaw? In the light, you are promiscuous, god-like. In the light, no one can harm you, wavelength that resists touch. Your husband arranges you on the bed like a shirt he’s trying to fold — straightened arms, smoothed body. You are a project, a chore, a mess that needs to be cleaned-up. What more is there to sadness but an open window that lets the ocean in? In the echo you hear a boat trying to sink. If your love was a boat, it would be called Where Do We Go From Here? The body expands like a country. The body collapses like a country. There are riches buried under the fear of never being remembered — cakes and metal and dreams of Mars. The problem with being alive is clean mirrors, the way they turn you into cellophane that screams when you put your mouth to it. When you put your mouth to me, I try to ignore god standing in the corner of the room. He blabs with the ocean about where not to touch me. Everywhere. She is a landmine. She only wants to take you apart.
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). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Boston Review, Best New Poets, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, and elsewhere. Meghan is the recipient of a NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
This poem appeared in The Pinch.