Answers crowdsourced from the author’s Instagram. Italics denote direct quotes.
Absent parent(s)
and the man who made me
mistrust every man after.
I haven’t earned it yet—
what is love if not a salary?
The sweet treat we get
for being demure.
It feels too selfish,
too vulgar, unladylike
to gorge myself
on the moist cake of it.
I’ve got bad credit,
a prettier sibling, a rank
history of mistakes,
each one more foul
than the last. The timing
was all wrong.
The timing was right
but I was afraid
of losing it.
I am disorganized.
My brain is broken,
and it was stuck on something
I thought was love.
I’ve spit out it before
just to prove that I can.
I believe I am ugly.
and in the end,
it’s just easier this way,
familiar as a callous,
tongued over like
a cracked tooth:
suffering feels cleaner,
because if I start to believe
I actually deserve love,
I’d have to find
unacceptable all
those incapable of
giving it.
“I Asked Why Have You Denied Yourself Love” by Sierra DeMulder. Copyright 2023. Courtesy of Button Publishing Inc.
I now replace desire
with meaning.
Instead of saying, I want you, I say,
there is meaning between us.
Meaning can swim, has taken lessons from the river
of itself. Desire is air. One puncture
above a black lake and she lies flat.
I now replace intensity with meaning.
One is a black hole of boundless appetite, a false womb,
another is a sentence.
My therapist says children need a “father” for language
and a “mother” for everything else.
She doesn’t get that it’s all language. There is no else.
Else is a fiction of life, and a fact of death.
That night, we don’t touch.
We ruin nothing.
We get bagels in the morning before you leave on a train,
and I smoke a skinny cigarette and think
I look glam, like an Italian diva.
You make a joke at my expense, which is not a joke, really,
but a way to say I know you.
I don’t feed on you. Instead, I watch you
like a faraway tree.
Desire loves the what if, the if only, the maybe in another lifetime.
She loves a parallel universe. Or seven.
Meaning knows its minerals,
knows which volcanic magma belongs
to which volcanic fleet.
Knows the earth has parents. That a person is raised.
It’s the real flirtation, to say, you are not a meal.
To say, I want you
to last.
Copyright © 2023 by Megan Fernandes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.