Two
Megan McShea
Baltimore Prayer
Precisely this fogged window, which prevails in the cold, wet night, blinks out onto an uninhabited land of Other People?s houses and in sight of all that forgotten real estate, along with all the amiable conversations on phones across America and evenings shared in movie houses, around the corner from a recent homicide, down the block from wild lots and weeds, great unknowns, colossal, all evolving along with Darwin and his species. One?s life, assumed to be finite, ticking away. Night covers things up but you can still hear the rain.
Pressure comes from a thousand enemies buried in your heart. You practice fighting them, and then one day, it seems like they?re gone. One day, allowing for silences, it breaks. You can prepare. It?s like preaching. Ready yourself.
Objects for the Home
Adolescent banter pierced the walls like a religious vision, bridging again the gap between the exigencies of the day and the levitation of saints. It sits there yellow and charms us every day, like sunlight on a slow macadam road. Undivided vistas and soft bright compartments suitable for the activity of thinking. You are not thinking about me, of course. That is part of your loveliness.
Flying like a winter sparrow that is too domesticated to enact its true wild nature, a great spiral found its way to the optic nerve, seeing at once the environment of choice and nothing at all. At home, a room for each facet of your personality, facets you didn?t even know were there. The youth again, not yet drowning you out, wonders what happened to her hat or her comb or something equally quotidian that has vanished into the ether to produce delightful wisps in clouds south of here. When light draws objects effortlessly, one seems to fly along with it.
When such continuities arise, we either sleep or organize search parties. We cannot tolerate the randomness of light and time. We yell and beat our chests, yell into small, electronic devices, coaxing patterns into being so that we might rest our flagging belief on them, and they might remain as objects: sure, charming, purposeful.
Megan McShea lives in Baltimore. Her work appears in the anthologies Topograph: New Writing from the Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond, the i.e. reader, and The Un Saddest Factory Presents a 10 Minute Play Festival. She has also contributed to The Shattered Wig Review, SuperArrow, Everyday Genius, Baltimore Is Reads, and the Parallel Octave and Rock Heals blogs.