I hunted love with a hacksaw,
a threaded needle between
my teeth. Scavenger of blood
and resemblance, I slaughtered
my siblings for body parts,
vowing, We’ll never be orphans
again. Then I retreated
to a mother’s dirty work:
sawing, stitching, waiting
for lightning. My creation
was born to disappoint: she is so
unlovable. Now she’s on the lam
inside me—shrieking, slobbering,
smashing everything.
Meg Kearney is the author of two books of poems for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions, 2001) and Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009), winner of the 2010 PEN New England L. L. Winship Award, as well as two novels in verse for teens: The Secret of Me (National Geographic Books, 2007) and its sequel, The Girl in the Mirror (Persea, 2012). Meg’s picture book, Trouper, is forthcoming from Scholastic in fall 2013. Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Doubletake, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, Passages North, Desperate Act, The Berkshire Review, and the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998), Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, 2007). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Massachusetts. For more information, visit her website at www.megkearney.com. (updated 6/2013)