2 Poems by Megan Harlan

The Old Country

That was our future: the riverbanks tamed

with brickwork, the train timetable listing

missing stops, our town’s surviving industries

of young beauties, liquor stores, lewd

portraits of the afterworld. Still I loved you

under all of those conditions, the familiar touch

braiding pleasures where none accounts, beyond

the bridge flocked with crows and the downtown

carved from a few gaunt, omnipotent beliefs,

their bared mechanics grinding into us

desires so deep I could not think, as I took what

they’ll give for doing as you’re told, at first.

Summer

The reef of it, pool algae, every part of coconut,

the culture served with mayonnaise on a paper plate.

I am standing on the sidewalk in the haze of you.

The warfront now become a seasonal constellation,

blue dispatches glimmering over a bath-warm ocean.

Let’s not call the battle before it’s won or lost.

Let us swim, instead, in these public waters,

sun leveling their surfaces gold, hand ourselves over

to this winnowing afternoon, a fearless

embrace by body alone, shadows fluctuating

cool, darkening flags across our bare skin,

the never-ending lines. We were all hand-picked for this,

green days before the wildfires, miles from here.

Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2020), awarded the 2019 AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and Mapmaking (BkMk Press-UMKC, 2010), winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, PBS Newshour, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, TriQuarterly, and Poetry Daily, among other publications, and has received the Confrontation Poetry Prize, the Arts & Letters Award in Creative Nonfiction, and citations on the Notable list in Best American Essays 2018, 2019, and 2021. She holds an MFA from New York University and work as a writer, editor, and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France.

19 December 2022