Two Poems by Margaret Saigh
By Margaret Saigh
IMAGE FRACTURE
A book. An answer. A person. A moon. Some of mine
Something of mine, mine a rhythm
Rhythm and ritual
Ritual and rhythm… I have not paid
Attention to the moon…I have not studied
Its hope
Shape in order not to break myself
On the sofa
Suctioned to the savior
Ideology of the television. I am an anti-
Capitalist
But I do not know
What I’m
For. Love. More time.
I am repeating what my friend
K. said. K.
Is my friend
For this Time
In which I am consumed
With time
K. simply
Moves thru it, letting the tarot
Cards fall thru
Their hands, all rhythm
A ritual due to the patterns
Braided thru and I cannot
Stop
Picking the symbols thru & thru. Anyway.
I am walking
Down the street
Thinking
Not for the first time in my life
I’ve grown intensely
Moral. I do not mean to turn
Myself into an archetype.
I am not the one
In control here and it’s raining
Up north, the cracked isles
Of mud reforming
To a kind of Pangea under the slivered
Light of the moon.
It makes sense
A book could be
The answer that a person
Could also be. You must fall
In love
With something. A person. A book. A moon.
You must merge with that which is
Divine in your soul.
I am in love but I am not
Religious. Things are speaking to me
What I needed to know tho I’ve yet to uncover
What those things are
Only that the matter
Of bone
Locked in what I thought to be
Irreparable space
Has shifted and adjusted
Itself the mechanism
Of a key turning
In the lock of the door of a home I haven’t inhabited
For months
For years since I stood
In the hallway
Damasked in the jammy light of the stained
Glass. The pain of being not chosen still coursing
Thru me like a newly wetted
River there is so much I want
To tell you
It seems too easy
The poem is for you
For the spaces I’ve inhabited
The ones you’ve never
Come to
Now resting in the rising
Matter of your brain
Your brain is a staircase
That is what the metaphor
Intended, and metaphor
Is cheaper
Than the truth that the loss of love
Is recurring in all the spaces
I’ve inhabited, the memories
Fractured in the shared image
Imposed onto glass they will deliver to your door
For nineteen ninety nine plus the cost of shipping
And the human
Hand in it all
VACCINATION
the morning
I pried open my lips
to speak to the pharmacist
was the first time I had spoken
in what felt like months
it felt like my mouth had been
glued shut like the girl
who bought a counterfeit KYLIE lip kit
on amazon which was spiked
with industrial sealant
the gloss might have been a shade called
MIRACLE
and I wouldn’t have worn it
under any circumstances
I got my flu shot and walked
out into a bracing
circulation of leaves
Image Credit: The Moon, John Adams Whipple 1857-60/ THE MET.
About the author:
Margaret Saigh is a writer from Chicago, currently getting her MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. Her poems can be found in Dirt Child and Columbia Journal, among others. Her first chapbook CROSSED IN THE DARKER LIGHT OF TERROR will be published in the summer of 2021 by dancing girl press.
