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MEG
HURTADO BLOOM

Meg Hurtado Bloom is a poet and creative director from San Francisco, California. Her poems have recently appeared in ZYZZYVA, the Be About It blog, Calamity, Silver Needle Press, Tinderbox Journal, The Volta, and elsewhere. She edits for Hologram Press and is a founding member of the Oakland-based poetry group Coven51.

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EVERYONE IS CUTTING THEIR HAIR

Everyone is cutting their hair,
or thinking of cutting their hair,
The Saturday morning cereal stare
happens all the time now, 
and Saturn has hitched up her hoopskirts 
& gone out for air.

​

In Venice, canals spring clean as aquariums,
—fish feel so seen.
The parks here are full; there’s nothing
can keep us from flowers; 
Flowers are always in our future. 
You’d best believe that Adam & Eve
attempted orchards everywhere 
they wandered.

​

Everyone’s cutting their hair,
or thinking of cutting their hair. 
We must keep up our beauty routine;
the body is a temple and
a temple is a prize. And Nature
was always like this. For years 
I dreamed of hateful things
I could say to the billionaires, 
but I could only ever think of one: 
a dragon always dies.

​

Everyone is cutting their hair
or thinking of cutting their hair
because everyone is very sorry.
It’s Biblical. My husband says 
I shouldn’t believe in original sin
and yet after the news he announces,
“People are like that”, 
and that's all Original Sin is.
A masterpiece is simply scene after scene, 
and blessed are those who try.

​

I get back in bed. I think of the beach. 
Everything’s precious.
There is a last time for everything.
I stand in my kitchen, 
tell love to come back
tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.
I pull on my lavender nightgown.
I hope. I open my eyes.

THE NEW HEMLOCK

Select your treasure carefully. You can really have only one. 
For a while you can have more than one, but someday 
you will have to choose what to hide from the guards. 
 
Maybe you grew up believing in the other sides of stories but
turns out, it’s all you. Imagination matrix here, pleasure threshold there. 
Last ramp into things conceivable, coming right up. 
 
Happiness goes unanswered for long periods of time and 
“eventually” disappears. Erotic allegory on lock over the Seine
promises plunge to cool future.
 
Science vs Magic. A woman trades her brain for a Real Man, 
lives knotted to forgetfulness until technology and her cunt 
can save her again. One day, with no explanation, 
 
everyone forgives. Her Immortality gets decreed 
in sparklers via poolside reveal. She is offered an understudy.
Her past gets brandished so she goes and makes more of it.
 
In the waiting room, I realized this was always 
a completely different movie. Or, I had imagined it all wrong.
 
And the stars said, Ladies, go ahead and feel your pain for a minute. 
Aaaaaand release. Take how you feel for a long drive, lead it to 
the cave at the end of the beach.
 
Wading in twilight stained by faraway wildfires, 
you casually imagine knocking anything off 
a desk full of unwritten letters.  The wrens are 
out there, having their way with late summer and her grasses. 
 
All those dark driven roads. All those times you didn’t 
deserve to be alive, but you were. All those times you didn’t
deserve to suffer, but you did. 

MY HEART WILL NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN

There, you hear it? Rustling up 
reasons, pressing through
freezing trees and 
yesterday’s rain and 
snakes braiding and 
unbraiding and just like that 
it’s spring—

Watch the street, 
chart clouds’ course across town. 
It is cold. People run. 
The little girls in matching outfits,
have no idea what they mean,
hip to hip all the way to the light,
sweetness and sweetness again.

And there’s your heart still going 
door to door. Windchimes sound cruel, 
So you know it’s broken;
not like a window but a music box, 
one part missing
and that’s it. 

SINCE I HAD A BABY, HORROR MOVIES ARE NOT THE SAME

Now when the little alien 
hatches, screams,
flings goo across the floor,
my breasts twitch, 
I hear something precious,
tiny appetite keening in darkness—
I mourn with the queen when they torch it.

I thrill again for Ripley 
—she who is ever-wet, 
exhaust raining through 
grey tank top— 
not when she kills but when
I see her in the elevator 
strapping on ammo,
a mom again, 
toting so much gear—the bras, belts,
salves, bottles, pads, rags,
tubes, teas, thermometers.

Bearing everything, and always
saving something: 
the leftovers, the milk,
the cat, the kid, the future;
she is never too tired
to keep everybody alive,
her heaven an endless checklist,
horizon after horizon—

Spend every moment staring, they said.

You’ll never get it back, they said.

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