When the Moon is Full It Begins to Wane

7/30/2019 When the Moon is Full It Begins to Wane

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When the Moon is Full it Begins to Wane

Poems by Meagan Maguire

1/3/13


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Table of Contents:

A Circle Is A Sacred Thing

Like Orange Flesh in Your Teeth

Damask

An Anti-Haiku

The Hornet, The Inevitable Sting

Wheat

Carnivore

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@MeaganWords


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A Circle is A Sacred Thing

A circle is a sacred thing.

We are circles you and I,

turning and turning in the widening gyre,

turning in opposite directions,

reaching, feeling for the end of the world.

We are sacred together, yes, we are.

We are sacred like the new moon, the full moon,

The bastard child laid out on a cliff to die.

They call that kind of death death by exposure.

To be exposed is to die,

So I die with you,

not wretched or screaming, but quiet, content.

happy to be perceived and kind-heartedly mocked.

You tell me an eclipse is a symbol of atonement,

so good, let it be dark.Let us commit more sins we can atone for.

I am wrapped in your bed, silent,

tracing new circles on your skin.

Circles that turn and turn in the widening gyre.


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Like Orange Flesh Caught in Your Teeth

I can't wait for you to become famous.

Then I'll sell your love letters.I'll retire to Florida. Lick the innards of oranges.

I'll buy them with coins forged from your love.

Your love isn't good for anything but buying oranges.

That's ok, Vitamin C is essential.

That's ok, just become famous.

Just draw more penciled-in hearts on the margins of letters.

Just sit on my stoop too drunk to fuck.

Orange peels are acceptable children

to leave on my doorstep.

I don't need real ones.

That's okay.

It has always been ok.


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Damask

Damask is the color of my eyes

That flash too quickly,

These wicked traffic lights.

I am the slick, slick golden cobra

Kipling warned you about.

I have little patience. So come,

Come cut your stiff wings

On the sharp lines of my mouth,

My vicious teeth.


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We live half-caged, you and I,

In this villa by the Phosphorous Sea

That glows and explodes at will.

My sharp fingernails shine at dinnertime

When I pry apart mouse meat and slither itDown my throat, bleeding and biting.

You, on the other end

Of the satin-finished puce table nibble at

Chicken livers. Your greasy fingers shake.

Why do you stay here Oiseau?

An artistic type of suicide?

Perhaps you love the furniture too much to go.

Damask is the color of my eyes

That flash too quickly.

When you talk too much sense.


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An Anti-Haiku

Today it is fall.

And I wear a jacket from the plastic factory

whose toxins killed

The woman I loved.

And as I walk I crush

A thousand dying leaves.


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The Hornet, The Inevitable Sting

A Hornet flew in my window today.

I told it I love you.

Begged it to sting me.

Its name was Lover.

With a knife,

I scraped the inside of a pomegranate.

Sucked the juice from the seeds.

Once on the radio I heard no apples existedin the Garden of Eden. Only pomegranates.

The Hornet buzzed, setting its tiny thorax

on my hair, hand. The nape of my neck.

Every touch was a lesson:


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Don't love when you can hunt.

Don't look through glass when you can break it.

Don't kiss when you can stay alone.

Don't sit when you can sting.

Its barb pierced the back of my neck.A bit of poison entered me.

As the hornet flew off I told it

(softly this time)

I love you.


10/13

Wheat

I only eat Wheat.

noodles, breads, cookies, etc.

Nothing else is necessary.

I am like the fields of Kansas:

made of wheat, alone, predictable.

I drink beer because beer is Wheat.

My lover is poisoned by my substance.

He has Celiac disease, must be gluten-free.

My kiss makes him break out in hives.

I am like the fields of Kansas:traversing the landscape alone,

waving though no one is there.


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Carnivore

I have found I care less and less about animals.

Especially carnivores.

In my mind all carnivores smell like blood, death, and rotting.

My father ate mainly pork and steak

for the last five years of his life.

He smelled like death and then he died.

Death is at the center of my nightmares,

but then death is at the center of everything:

dark, immutable. Touching further,

deeper than light.

I find I care less and less about animals.

Especially humans.

Humans who are the ultimate carnivores.

Who consume flora and fauna,


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land, earth, sea, and ultimately

Each other.

Humans are made of ashes and dust,

Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust,

I am human.

I have found I care less and less about myself.

At night I sleep in a puddle of mercury.

Silvery and poisonous it wraps around my head.

I`m making amends with the unspeaking presence

he left behind in my own way.

In my quiet way,

In my staring at the wall, forgetting to answer the phone way.

On Memorial Day I didn't visit his grave.

I have found I care less and less about grief.


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About:

When the Moon is Full it Begins to Wane is a collection of poetry by Meagan Maguire.

Meagan Maguire is 21 and lives in Portland, ME. Her work has previously been featured in The

Eunoia Reviewand The Golden Sparrow Literary Review. She has upcoming credits in Words &

Imagesand Marco Polo.

When the Moon is Full it Beings to Wane is named after a Japanese proverb. Most of the poems in it

were written in mid to late 2012, which was a time of great transition in my life. They represent a new

direction I'm starting to take creatively.

Thank you to everyone who ecouraged me to keep writing, to everyone out there working on creative

endeavours, and to everyone taking time to read this now.

When the Moon is Full It Begins to Wane

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