Ashling Meehan–Fanning is a poet based in the Midwest, finishing her MFA at Augsburg University. Recently she was the featured poet in the collection Terra Verse by Elixir Verse Press. Ashling’s work often includes themes of magic, ancestry, and the American Midwest. She spends a lot of time thinking about ghosts and trees.

Grief

How it can stick inside the lining of your throat.
Contorted tight, a ball of red twine in your chest.
How it stings prettily behind your eyes until
your sight is watercolor. An uninvited guest at the table.
An unexpected knock on the door.
Two halves of a broken whole.
I’m familiar with how grief can turn silvery and liquid.
How it can run through your fingertips and twist around your insides.
Binding you lightly – almost as if it’s not there.
An invisible wire running head to toe, keeping you upward,
keeping you moving, talking, breathing, thinking
until one sharp, unannounced dislocation digs the wire in wrong,
and you’re reminded of its presence. Of absence. And like
a gaping hole, your body bends and collapses against the ache.
You’re left to learn how to rebuild your body.

morning phone calls

It snowed again last night. Encased the world in white and
muffled the gray earth underneath a snowy sea of slow and quiet.

You need quiet, you said to me,before launching into stories about your day:
the tests at the hospital, the cup of coffee the nurse brought you, what you had for dinner.

Snow makes the world quiet but you hate the snow. You hate the cold because it reminds
you of fighting for the warmest sleeping spot in the bed you shared with your siblings.

It reminds you of your first winter in America and how you didn’t own a jacket thick enough
to protect against the Chicago wind. It reminds you of being without.

I love the snow, and I hate the quiet. So I’ll listen to you talk, and by the time the call ends, and the plows have come down my street, we’ll both have gotten what we wanted this morning.

The Poem I Will Never Write

you tried to bury it
in the garden
among ferns and bones
but it came back up
its boots sticking out of the dirt
a roguish smile on its face.
you tried digging deeper,
tried spells and the tricks
your mother taught you
but each night the moonlight
licks its bare, uncovered face
its eyes staring up at your bedroom
window, its voice echoing like
latent thunder, like deep
rumbling of the earth’s core,
when it asks why.