Falling

Meghan Shaffer

​

in love with myself

electric and blue and jaded

self-flooded, but able

and not, but

to know me is to gamble me

like that dream i once had or

still having, that blue—

placid, like the grave

behind every cloud

i succumb to its cycles,

spit it out when i’m done

like an unwanted child

falling in love with myself—

my liquid, my guilt, my lines

forming rings around the forest:

i go there. i am my own shovel—

find the pages, burn it all down

just for the view, the endorphin

the science of it all, and to hold tight

the musk of my father’s racism

he served with rice and broccolini

on pigskin sundays—

falling in love with myself

is a cave

i never would have found

if instead the waters whispered

and my mother never drowned

before me. it is the tale—

the gunshot of freedom

i asked the Fat Man to keep

oh, how lucky am i

to fall in love with myself

just when the blue unfolds

into dusk and captures me—