Anna Meister
MY OWN HELL TO RAISE |
Crinkle-cut French fries dipped in sugar
packets before I woke somewhere else without my shoes. I know what they do to the burgers back there, know everyone’s tweaking or coming down hard. I’m not, he liked to say, a bad guy, but he blew smoke in my face & blew me off. Try to imagine holding the spoon until it’s hot or being kissed like a swarm. My stomach full of lemons in the guest bathroom. My uncle died & it should’ve been me was what everyone thought or I thought so. First one made me do it & made me feel dumb, but it seems silly now. Once I punched a boy when he called me a ghost. Couldn’t have been slower at becoming, as in, I was forgotten & so hungry. Bruised by any barely-touch, always coughing & catching whatever. There was a sink in my room, a mouse eating my chocolate. I want to say everyone was worried about me. A couple months in Minnesota & a rum bottle bought by some guy outside the grocery store hidden under the bed. Was I alive? Hey Mister. I was just a body I didn’t know. |
AS IF WITH OUR EYES CLOSED
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We shared a house once. Named it Hell.
Minds abandoned for autumn’s grand experiment to live off cottage cheese, oatmeal, gin. Whole papers written in an evening on the plaid couch, nose dripping something orange Scott crushed for me. The backyard all weeds & fire, tree tied up with bottles, proof we were real bad. Plenty of things happened in that place: potato bag pissed on mid-party, dreams of falling to cold bathroom tile & staying there. A bracelet that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard I yanked. I had to leave & wasn’t it easy to give you all the blame as, still soft, you watched from the garage my packed car pulling over gravel. Long drive west toward a different windowless room. |
ANNA MEISTER is an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University, where she serves as a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her poems are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Souvenir, Reality Beach, & her chapbook NOTHING GRANTED will be published by dancing girl press in 2016. Anna lives & works in Brooklyn.
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