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Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
Poesy
Two Poems
by Megan Burns
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Goodnight, Our Childhood

After the wreck, the night ended
your father's arms around you
clenched against the threat of morning.

The telephone checked our silence
and hands you held since kindergarten
had no strength to still your shaking,
all of us clinging to your house.

The world had become a dangerous place
our sleepovers transformed into a ritual
of unrehearsed movements, battles
against the unknown, the unbearable time between
sun down and morning when we could ease into smiles
over breakfast.

When we were little girls
your mother's favorite trick
was to burst in just after dawn
tooting an imaginary horn made out of a slightly
closed fist lifted to her lips. She would laugh
at our faces smeared with make-up from late nite
beauty contests. We wanted to be women. From her funeral

we carefully sorted
and discarded plastic flower baskets
laid them to rest beside trash bags bursting
with the weight of empty beer cans,
wasted cigarettes. Later that night we ate
Chinese food with wooden chopstix
to make you smile
your mother's smile

Amid the morning confusion of everyone
returning to their lives
I watched you, unseen from the doorway, finally
turn and press your face against the white and blue afghan.



Delicate Cutting

one hand covers your face
in the photograph the glare from the window
captured beside you dissolves the solid lines of your grin
and so you are not cheek or forehead, not eyebrow
or lips, but pictures do this
for us, catching the unspeakable often
I cannot tell you but with words
how we navigate the unbearable

in the photograph
the women's faces have been covered
and their sexes exposed I wonder how we
will recognize one another? I can make out
the youngest among them, the curve
of her hip, the thinness of her lips
her body poised before womanhood
like a trapeze artist who begins to waver
then freezes

it takes a delicate cutting
to get enough of your face out
to cover hers I've rearranged the terror
for you because I know what you own
owns you and so you too must be legs splayed
pale as the moon, rudely exposed knees cocked
to one side and feet covered in dust the womb
if it could borrow your grin would
and say there are some moments that are poetry
before you get to them


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