Another Word for Violence and My Breath Held Like a Gun
Another Word for Violence
We had been poking the jellyfish all morning with sticks we wielded like swords.
In the early morning sun they looked just like the slick of spit on a sidewalk.
The smack of jellyfish had come ashore overnight to our childish delight.
Not understanding how much had died in that gleam we laughed & poked until
I went off alone. The ocean kept on bringing them ashore until the tide changed,
pulling itself back out, leaving the jellyfish to our violences & the bird’s sharp beaks.
Those jellyfish were immortal — capable of growing younger, bypassing death,
beginning again. Let’s go back that way, put down our sticks & grab our buckets,
take the jellyfish back out to the swash, watch them get caught in the break,
floating back in the ebb to the possibility of living forever. Let’s be jealous of them.
Another way to say all of this is: when we were small, I learned to lie on my back & kick
because you were stronger & faster, but my legs were tireless from all the running away.
I never insisted on anything but wanted to see how far away I could get after your anger
hushed to the lap of water on that distant shore. Forgive me for running off
& leaving you with those jellyfish when I found the joy of a sandcastle. I still remember
those glassy bodies split open by our sticks as we worked hard to find their hearts,
not understanding anything about life without a red & pounding pulse. How could we know
we both wanted the same thing in different ways? Jellyfish hearts to justify or condemn.
The way that night our parents gathered driftwood while we dug a hole for it,
how they shoved crumpled newspaper below it, & you got to light the match I wanted to.
Another word for that is strike. See how one word can come to mean a way to harm or
a way to bring light to a night against the briny air & the tremble of abandoned jellyfish?
My Breath Held Like a Gun
I’ve read that silence shouldn’t be
broken. Let it be, they say. But then
how can I account for the dropping
Camellia petals & the snakes in the grass
that sound like legs against sheets?
How do I make up for the heart
in your chest, beneath my ear,
that beats its way toward silence?
Listen to this, I say. You turn your
ear to my mouth. Even some moths make noise,
I whisper, In warning, in warning.
This morning, I walked through
a neighborhood I don’t know or
belong to. It was so quiet my breath
became a loaded gun, pressing out
through my ribs. The gates closed,
the bushes shaped into spear tips,
the iron bars inside the hedges,
concealed protection —
all of it keeping me out there
on the shoulder of a road that curves
like watching love leave the long way.
As children, my brothers & I hid
with a 5-gallon bucket of water
we carried together to the edge
of the woods where the road carved close to the bushes
that hid us, water guns tucked under our arms,
aiming for the front window of passing cars.
We did this all summer, until a man
chased us through the woods
& we hid beneath a log in the creek
until shivering felt more dangerous
than an angry man. It almost sounds
like we stopped after that, but we didn’t.
We kept sloshing the bucket out,
taking aim, running breathlessly away.
Somewhere else someone else
lights a cigarette & he knows this story
already. He’d tell it different, he wasn’t scared.
He’d tell you I clung to his arm, he shook it free,
he led us to the creek so he could laugh & not
be caught. Years later, it will be a real gun
on his kitchen counter. Between us,
potential energy & different versions
of the story will build. There won’t be room
for my breath, so I will hold it, become silent
as a moth, pinned to a board, laid open
so you can see where the sound was made.
Meghan McClure is author of the chapbook Portrait of a Body in Wreckages (Newfound Press, 2017) and co-author of A Single Throat Opens (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Water~Stone Review, American Literary Review, Pithead Chapel, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in California.
Photo Credit: Shalene Cruz, New Mexico Review Staff