Author | Megan Sims
Just ask me how to fall from grace.
I’ll tell you, but I think you already know,
for you were born of fangs, of bite marks
first and foremost. I was born
of earth, like your father. In your mother’s womb
you were half like your father in being
just like your father, too far past
your father still kneeling on the river bed
when he was watering flowers
that were already dead. Only I
could have told him that. Women
are not like plants but like
the sky. They called me night-demon
but I told them night-sky. They named me
she-demon but I told them she-tried.
And such was the way of the lord, amen.
A man on the river bank waiting for rain, men
not yet made from his dirt-sown flesh. He and I
were grown and watered. He and I,
we made that sky you call a blessing.
I laid myself out, he took me to the river delta
of deltoid muscles, straining to hold
the weight of the world in my rib cage.
And I reached. Inside my grip was world, was earth,
was you not yet in existence. I breathed
the wind, I bled the sea, I cried Tigris,
Euphrates behind hands to my match my lips.
I cried, screech-owl night-monster, let the world
fear the living over the dead, for I refused
to die outside the garden walls. Now I
am the face of the moon, you a broken bone
that never healed. You lost your shadow
to the bright lights, to the blinding.
Don’t ask me how to fall from grace.
I think you already know.
About the Author | Megan Sims is an undergraduate at Harvard College, where she studies folklore and mythology and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Her work has been featured in The Blueshift Journal, The Postscript Journal. The Riveter Review, and Polyphony HS and has been recognized by YoungArts and the Scholastic art and writing awards.