Climate
It felt familiar, your mouth moving
up my side like a gale warning. My
arm calico—mammatus clouds—
blood brought to the surface.
Now I understand my childhood
home. Releasing shingle after shingle
into the brutal air. Our front door
torn and flat in the yard. Violent
gusts whipping through the marshes—
the back of your hand.
Of what I have unlearned
this was the hardest.
One sandpiper singing
still, desire does not
have to leave you
ruined.
Copyright © 2022 by Meghann Plunkett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“As a child of a traditional woman, and growing up in New England on a small peninsula of land, I witnessed erosions of many kinds. The shoreline curbing back a few inches after each storm, the flooding of our main streets, the ways the women of my family would shrink and serve—what they would tolerate—always under the threat of disappearing. It took me years to realize that I was allowing the re-creation of my early family destruction into my own adult life. And years more to change it.”
—Meghann Plunkett
Meghann Plunkett
Meghann Plunkett is the winner of the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, as well as Third Coast’s poetry prize.