All the Rooftops in the World
Tell me—
Tell me how to rain. Tell me how
humans can be more than human,
tell me how this city is vein, tell me
how we are blood,
then tell me how to catch thunder
when all our skies are gone,
all our champagne spilled.
Tell me how gray air is lace between your
lungs, tell me why. Tell me
where you go when all the rooftops
in the world aren’t heavy enough to make
our gravestones, when you wear your shadow like
a scarf or a noose, when
I am at the window watching you go
and praying that
people and gods are contagious—
tell me how to look away from that window.
A Short Obituary
A short obituary:
She collected things she thought were sacred—
a crow’s wing like calcified ink, chocolate
from her grandmother’s parlor.
She curled smoke between her toes
and said that she was a revolutionary,
this acrobat of sidewalks and side roads.
She got drunk on Jane Austen, bloated herself
on Shakespeare—words became search boats
in her veins, as if there were still other,
less drowned bodies to pull from her blood—
too late: a bit of twine, a few wires, all that was left.
She pressed a book to her chest like she was waiting for
osmosis in her sleep—the doctors called it asphyxiation,
so the rest of us picked up the books from her nightstand,
the watercolors from her jewelry box,
and wondered if all her air had simply
left.
Megan Lunny is from Doylestown, PA, where she writes for her local newspaper, and where she was named Bucks County High School Poet of 2017. Megan also holds a Gold Medal in Flash Fiction from National Scholastic Art and Writing.