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July/Aug 2017 • Vol. XXXIX No. 4 • Poetry |

Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughterxx

By Meghan O’Rourke

Meghan O’Rourke Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter Do you not want to be alive? I cant say I don’t understand— To bring something into the world, a creature that will be ruled by the conflict between its “will” and its impulses, surroundings, limitations We choose many things, but we cant say we choose existence. My existence is not mine the way my opinions are, my blue crepe pants, my taste for cherries. My existence belongs in some sense to my parents, and to the universe — or God, if you believe in God. It belongs to evolution, the galaxy and the space beyond, to black holes, to red dwarfs, to hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. My existence belongs to iron. I understand, in a way, my body’s reluctance to impose existence on another— and yet I — I almost feel you are real and I know you, turning over the beach shell in my hands, remembering the red sailboat shirt you wore all this summer, 22 Kenyon Reviewwith a button for the yellow sun — With my small phone always tucked about my person under the great lavender sky I’ll set forth on a pilgrimage to the bridge that way accept the noble truth which is to be absorbed in the enormity of it without fail even if the precipice keeps leaving you voice mails— Perhaps the reason you don’t come is that it is more painful to me to have you than not to? : the person who first put a boat in a bottle and later wondered why she’d had the impulse to contain — Before you have sight the colors sway underneath your eyes like kelp. It is false to speak like this, but false not to speak of you — all the language I have for you is ornamental — 23 Poetrybut the sun is no ornament go out and see it stand under it rushing onward let the body go borderless and drained a scrim for the light to come through.

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Meghan O’Rourke, a poet and essayist, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sun In Days. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, she teaches in the writing programs at NYU and Princeton.

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Dread

By Meghan O’Rourke

My keys jingling beside the honeysuckleas we walk home from dinner, our iPhones glittering with e-mailscalling us to the things of the world. The moon wired to the skyby all […]

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