Megan O'Patry

 
San Diego, June

I announce my arrival to the deceased and their empty
      bellies,
tucked as they are up to the dinner table

their eye-plumage—
spread over coffee and dreams of oily cigarettes
I lose my name in their looseness
become she. Just she.

She and some other weapon too old to travel with

Crack open an egg for the noise, the noise is always
      fresh
the house is always old, June. Old and eaten.
San Diego is old.
Even the waters along its edge cannot keep it clean
and age is filth, isn’t it June?
Aren’t we all just filthy southerners missing our
      pronouns—
aren’t we just that?

Sometimes there’s a way to hear the ocean
a way to drown in the sound of the plummet

but when there is no ocean there is still the beat
      of an egg.

war season

I have lived out your eye
sticky rum veins
and its alphabet drained of water

We all stir its good morning
flooded soldiers enroute
baked with too much weeping

We have no stream to give away—
yet I hear the brittle wet
yawn through the bathroom door

I see us point to it—
an absent finger marking
aimless bubbles along the sea’s front line

the coldness shudders—
its own notes gather
a perversion of numbers
loitering the hinge of a loose spell

We are torn—our misfit limbs reassemble
      a mighty army
to dig out the rot of a tree
we arrange the brail stones
spell out each death in the livery—

all those warm bodies
will feed the cold,
through this war season

 

Megan O’Patry received an MFA from San Francisco State University and is an alumnus of the Hedgebrook Writers in Residence Program and the Djerassi Resident Artist's Program. O’Patry’s poems have appeared in Cricket Online Review, Greatcoat, Poetry MidWest, and Washington State's 2025 Queer Poetry Anthology, and is forthcoming in Kindred Characters. 

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