MEG LUBEY

Meg Lubey is a visual artist and writer in Cleveland, Ohio. They are also the author of a chapbook called "About Cutting Limes and the Moon Being in Half". Website: meganlubeyart.com

ALL ABOUT WANT

Need this beautiful loser to scour me 

for boyishness like checking a dog for fleas 

and I need more of it. Eat me, 

leave the flannel then put it back on. 

Watch me watch a stranger grieve as a midnight snack.

Let me tell you about how the day I got a girlfriend I

also wrote my own will. How I’d never felt better. How I

skipped the funeral that morning 

and found more death that afternoon. I want 

to obsess all over you with eyeliner and blush and I want

to be normal about it. I want to make something out of

myself. I don’t know what yet. I don’t care if I’m broke

anymore. I think you’re perfect 

and that you’re perfect far away. 

I look for you in pixelated screens and I find 

you there. I think someone needs to take my

eyes away from me. I think sinning’s all I got.

I think someday I’ll ask you a perfect

question.

ODE TO THE TYPOS IN MY PUBLISHED WORK

I love you. I love you 

so big. I love our humbling, 

butter-fingered conception. 

Our meet-cute. You, 

just big enough for your britches, you,

the high E-string my pinky finger keeps

catching. Me, the guitar. 

Me, the pinky finger. 

You, catching. You, a catch, a dime,

a total babe. You’re blush 

on a cartoon character. 

You’re the color pink. 

So soft and surprising, yet a hot sun in

the center of my chest. You’re brandy in

my throat, hot wassail in my hands,

warm to the point of forgetting, haunting,

cohabiting. I love you, 

your hand pushing the bangs out of my eyes.

I love you, your hand 

pulling all that human out of me. 

You watch me make a mess 

in the kitchen so fondly. 

You insist we keep the bathroom door open.

I am so afraid but you are so playful. I love

you and I love the way you began our

ongoing prank war. 

The way you carefully balance 

the bucket of water above the door,

baptizing me entirely new. 

I love you. I love you. 

I love you.

THE BODY AS SOMETHING THAT TAKES CARE OF

wrongfully, fully, asking & asking & asking 

completely, incredibly, rightfully, biting 

feet collapsing, splitting couch cushion darning,

knees waning, softening hardwood, totally 

& kind of proudly, rapidly, endlessly, & entirely

unembarrassed, sincerely & indecently talking & talking

& talking, loving & something like loving, adoringly,

violently, excessively, obviously, eagerly consuming, not

enough & over & over & over, skin adorning whatever &

whatever firmly, resolutely, beautifully, studying the

bathroom tile riotously, brutally, severely, and devout,

churning & gutting & caring & caring & caring & caring &

caring & caring & remembering & repeating, longingly,

deafeningly, sickly, forever & forever again, blaming

cruelly, distantly, eventually, arms & arms & hands wholly,

finally, seriously, mouths, seriously mouths, fervidly,

thoughtlessly, sweetly & hungrily & hungrily & hungrily &

beyond me

so i am

There’s lace on the boxing glove and you think I am evil

so I am evil. I wash my hands 

with sandpaper to finally get a grip but you’re already gone.

I’m needing all over again, I’m capricorning, 

this is my birthday party. 

The woman shouts into a megaphone that she is sick

and tired and done. We scream back outrage, 

I only want to cry. 

I drive for hours so we can all be in one room. 

I burst into flames. I want to grab this boy by his cheeks

and tell him we’ll be friends forever. 

I pick up the cat and he’s my whole wingspan. 

He is fat and great. I rock him. 

At the art museum I say over and over, my dad would love this. I don’t

make you pay for the movie ticket. I just want you to be there. I ask

some girl if she wants my eyes and I make her take them anyway.

Someone in New York loves me. I can wake up. 

I’m scared of the blankets but they’re there. 

I put curry into Marina’s bowl, then mine. 

I make my mom’s salsa for the party and I say, this is my mom’s salsa.

Somewhere, a whale breaks the ocean’s surface with its back.

Someone is praying for me. 

Someone is praying for me. 

This all happens with or without me. 

I’m hardly the words I say. You want to be 

all of it. You think I am evil so I am evil. 

I tell you even your bones can bend if you want it enough, that

even my skin can grow around the valleys of your knuckles. 

You don’t punch me because I work for my living and there’s this myth

about my skin and your touch. You are so respectful, 

in your gift of two birds. I can’t thank you enough.

EVICTION NOTICE

After I willed the girl to go to other side of the country without me, I got three jobs and all my earnings did was go on a killing spree with the American government. 

I count my tips, I eat something just to live, I shower and I dry. 

On the back of an eviction notice I write a list of everything that’s mine

and I feel lucky. I recite it to the cat until it loses meaning: 

forgiveness forgiveness forgiveness forgiveness forgiveness and so on.

I throw it in brine & put it in the fridge for later. 

I try to organize the physical things in cardboard: stacks of CDs, a lifetime of ceramic mugs, a cigar box of photographs, last summer’s receipt paper love notes, ticket stubs cut into his shape, sticky notes still clung to the distinct rasp of her voice. 

I am this archive of memory, I am no one’s home. I am another bad thing. 

Everyone in the world is on the 480 W, using all their hands at once. I’m a couch and you know it. You carry me up the stairs, you have sex on me, you sew me up again. Somewhere on that side street, a stack of boxes falls. Someone drafts the email template. 

I take out the pickled things, I make myself a sandwich, I’m anger all the time.

ALL MY LOVE IN BITS AND PIECES

At the water’s edge there is grey sky– lighter than grey lake, 

darker than grey seagulls. 

In my room there’s orange light and the soft pillow that is the 

inside of my friend’s arm and his immense capacity for me. 

My kitchen sink won’t drain, so I stack dish atop dish on the counter in a way

that whispers danger and precarity. I think 

the way this girl’s hair refuses to be contained by a rubber band 

will save me. I think I don’t need maintenance 

because I can be my own man. Or I could be her man. Or I could be the man. 

I’m thinking they should invent a kind of desire to be craved that isn’t 

humiliating or swallowing you up from the inside. 

I’m clutching at my chest, I’m running from catholicism, and love 

still feels like committing a crime. 

A cartoon tells me that life without the vulnerability of closeness 

is no life at all, so, 

I gift you your speech back. I raise you hands in hair. 

I scream to the God inside my computer screen: 

WHERE DO I PUT ALL THE GUILT???? 

HOW DO I SAY GOODBYE TO SORROW??? 

WHERE DOES MEMORY GO WHEN IT LEAVES THE BODY??? 

and everything runs down my arm and into your lap and 

you are so ready for it. 

Boldly, with no grace, you gather the edges of your sweater and my

terror fills the pool you’ve created. 

You look like a child in October in a stretched and stained shirt, burdened

with apples. 

I remember the girl looking like a saint, looking like Tony Molina’s Song of

Praise. I pretend that I have room for this. 

I glow so warmly, nothing close to the way you do.

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