Megan Peak

THE CASSANDRA COMPLEX

The neck of me glows hard, glares
long. Wreaths of hot breath shudder
each curve of your signature
down the length of my spine.

For ten months, warning signs
on the tips of your fingers:
black-boned, burnt tree, early blooms.

To speak nothing of the blow
………..is to speak only of the view.

Around the ring of my eye,
a swollen lake, a shining fuse.
However it’s told, I was
delicate with all your things,
bought you bags of birdseed,
combed your hair, washed your sheets.

………..Even now, I don’t believe it:

what the door still does to me
when it shuts. How the body
is a corner backed into.

These months, blue-wrecked, but I was
delicate with all your things:
the aged window, spools of twine,
each chrysanthemum picked clean
of burrs. They were more like your
hands than your hands ever were.

______________________________

Megan Peak currently lives in Columbus, Ohio and is enrolled in The Ohio State University’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in the anthology Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry and the online literary journal, The Bakery.