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—