2018 / poetry / author

KAT MYERS

 

MAY, ANYWHERE BUT HERE
…

I say,
Come with me.

I will scrape every penny
from this carpet until I can fill a bathtub with copper
and buy our way out of Carolina.

The dandelions will miss us, of course.
The dogwoods,
the honeysuckle and rosemary
in my mother’s front yard will wonder
where we have gone, but-

I have seen this sky.
All that is left is you.

You, drenched in the brick-heat of Barcelona,
at the rivermouths of Inverness,
in Johannesburg, Buenos Aires,
laughing as the cherry blossoms baptize you in Seoul.

I imagine reading your palm
like a compass in a field of foreign stars,
whispering to each new horizon
how I love you,
even if my clumsy tongue
no longer remembers the words.

You say,
Not with anyone else. But with you?

Darling, the wildflowers can wait.
They will bloom as they do every year
and when we return,
I will tell them how I kissed you
and woke up tasting like spring in the south.

MIDSUMMER OFF THE COAST OF SPAIN
…

I wanted to return to that place,
back to the open mouth of the ocean,
where the white cotton of my dress,
salt-soaked,
clung to my thighs,
back to Galicia, Pontevedra, La Isla,
and its heat-blushed skies,
where I studied the bones of my hand underwater,
shifting slow in the waves,
and a family dusted in cinnamon
sang prayers to the tide

watching as their daughter,
bare-chested and braver than me,
learned how not to swallow the sea or be swallowed by it, her braids unraveling to sticky curls,
her eyes stung red but shining still,
and her mother calling


sirena, sirena, mi sirenita,
each time she came up for air,
this girl so small in the arms of the atlantic,
but somehow,
she fit the entire sun between her teeth,
and I wanted to know,
know how much light it takes to be unafraid.

 
 

…

KAT MYERS is an emerging poet and former party girl. She is studying Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in her hometown of Raleigh. A finalist for the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, she has also been published in The Colton Review and The Rising Phoenix Review.

WHERE TO FIND KAT MYERS: INSTAGRAM

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