Can’t talk about Vermont
without fog. Fits. Beneath me,
he used only fingers. I imagine myself
a crocus. How did it happen?
The arrival of a roughness I’ll be honest
I wished for until—.
Mouth covered. Yanked
body, body pulled around. Boy
under my windowsill, I was still
broken when I came. I don’t need you
to tell me it’s hard for you to picture.
What to do when you can’t
remember the bruise’s origin? I end up
sorry for anything I don’t know
where the fault lies. Door busted in,
him still inside me after
circular talk of mountains. What
to do with that? Get real
anxious, piss on leaves I can
imagine being dragged over
because I was. Say one day
bled into the next because
it did. Or did it happen?
Smoke the loop quiet, choose
words carefully. Bled because
it happened that way.
Anna Meister is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU, where she serves as a Goldwater Writing Fellow. A Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net nominee, her poems are forthcoming in Whiskey Island, Barrow Street, Souvenir, The Adroit Journal, & elsewhere. Anna is a 2015 Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts fellow. She lives & works in Brooklyn.