Meghan McClure
Meghan McClure lives outside of Seattle, Washington. She studies at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is co-director of Zimbags, a non-profit organization empowering women in Zimbabwe to overcome extreme poverty.
Stars on Their Way Down
I.
They fall like heavy organs
still thick with life.
A human heart weighs between 9 and 12 ounces.
The brain weighs about 3 pounds.
The liver weighs just over 2 pounds.
The skin weighs between 8 to 10 pounds.
Have you ever felt a heart fall?
A lung collapse, breathless?
II.
The blood in your veins is thin,
a trail of cosmic dust.
I think of that blood dried up,
your body injected with false life.
In my mind they have made you too plump,
they have stolen the disease that was rightly yours.
III.
But you are still here. You are still here.
Flesh and bones and organs. Still here.
Still. Here. It is not still here. But you are still here.
I must not wish on you just yet.
Potential Energy
Energy stored within a system.
More specifically, energy of position.
He is on his knees,
she is on her back.
There is potential. There is energy.
Like all things, mass plays a role.
As does his height above her
and the gravitational acceleration
with which the events occur.
She is left with bruises
of force and potential.
If he calls tomorrow it is only one
possible outcome.
Another is that he marries her friend
or takes his dog to the park.
An object may have potential energy
as the result of many variables:
gravity, electricity, magnetic pull, or elasticity.
All of these are useful when converting
potential energy to kinetic.
Her elasticity impresses him;
he calls tomorrow.
The outcome is measured in jewels.
Refractions
Meditations of precision:
light refracted off a glass lens,
through a carefully prepared slide,
in a cup of water,
between parted fingers.
Tiny symbols pressed together
to form the way we view stars -
the angle of incidence,
which is always closer than we think;
the velocity of a wave (sight or sound)
can change speed, but not direction.
Partially reflected or partially refracted -
your gaze has a lot to do with it.
A man can be turned upside down
or doubled in a raindrop's dome.
A naked-eye double star gaze
becomes a naked double star, stuck in eye-gaze.