Foreword
Think Anne Sexton’s, “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph”—Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on, / testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade . . . Think Joy Harjo’s, “She Had Some Horses”—She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making. Think rhythms of stuttering hearts and imagery sprung from a state you’ve only dreamed of visiting.
What intrigues me about a micro chapbook is brevity—when the same degree of efficiency and stunning implication can be achieved as by Atwood’s “[you fit into me]”. Meghan Maguire Dahn achieves just that here in Lucid Animal, the impactful brevity of an iridescent short poem, with lines like “ask me / into the bathroom. I will breathe onto the mirror / until we are both gone.”
She breathes emotional life into everything considered here, giving every moment and animal its own lucidity. “We both know I’m game for any sharp thing / when you lift me up,” Dahn writes. Like the New Icarus that adorns its cover, Lucid Animal, smartly eschews flying too close to the sun and instead assumes the beauty of trying in the midst of trial, of bathing in the light that promises to outshine it.
Gregory stapp
November 2021
lucid animal
for Lucie Brock-Broido
Table of Contents
Never Do Housework with Imperfect Intent
The Conditions of Deprivation
(Mysterious and Subtle Mirror!)
The Other Trodden in Clover and Timothy
Tongue of the Doctor, Tongue of the Dog
Traveling Altar Bearing the Eight Auspicious Gestures
Viscosity
A Barter
Catechism
Shrike
never do housework with imperfect intent
When I was a housewife
I was the finest egret.
I would wait all day
for any train—yours
or any of a hundred commuter’s
as they flit their course on Narragansett.
I’d wade the anticonvulsant radius,
free of rope and sympathy.
We made a runt. Our glass half
empty. On the heirloom Blue Willow
I painted a beast. Each on each.
The withering work. My form
had been perfect. Now I cover
the mirrors. To approach god
build a charge with every coiling,
every uncoiling atom. Left left left.
Heart heart heart. I will chew
this secret when it grows full.
I will fold small clothes with my beak.
THE CONDITIONS OF DEPRIVATION
I am on edge—my vision improves with the heat.
When I faint my neck is livid.
Father and I paint the oak stump thick with tar.
//
The light that insists on my skin
is stubborn in the tar pits—the gasoline
creeks along the fault line.
//
I failed to excavate the excellent mammoth.
I hear the flies anoint the pit. Graceful,
for once, I entice one to my eyelid.
(MYSTERIOUS AND SUBTLE MIRROR!)
I keep this cloud in my mouth
and only let it out
on occasions of true contrition.
If you rub two things together long enough
they will both bruise. That is how you know
contrition and time and my cloud.
Darling, on this planet of distance
there is little I regret, but I promise you—
I am still waiting for the bruise:
I am still approaching my own cloud
knowing how quickly it can disperse.
I promise you one day the cloud will cover us
and everything we forgot will walk
shoulder to shoulder with us
until we recover all that completeness.
There is a remedy for regret: ask me
into the bathroom. I will breathe onto the mirror
until we are both gone
and though we know this blindness
can’t last, in that moment we’ll admit grace
through our useless eyes.
Opacity—O cloud—
what life is there for an abyss in a body?
What loneliness behind my lips.
THE OTHER TRODDEN IN CLOVER AND TIMOTHY
after Carolina Ebeid
At the center of my trust, a lamb is leaning
warm with worry. There, too, is its weaning.
My daughter tells me that when you fall asleep
that’s all your sin falling off. I cannot change
the impulses of others, nor can I change
what solace violence can bring. Every flock
establishes an economy, a geometric field
of survival. I read recently of selfish herd theory —
the repeated movement of individuals to the center,
forcing, again and again, their neighbors
into the peril of the periphery. The quickest,
the strongest, the most dominant ones
avoid predation in this way. I am not your best
beast of perpetual motion. Tell me an act
is an act and not something greater, and I bleat
an angry answer, sodden with the belief
that acts signify. In the teeth of the wolf — look —
there is the fleece of the lamb the ewe pushed out.
TONGUE OF THE DOCTOR, TONGUE OF THE DOG
after Stephen Crane
You followed the satin ribbon,
the detritus, the jealous feeling in the forest
to the suicide, who, among the drying mulberries,
allowed a pup to lick her wound.
“It is sovereign and clear,” she said, “and here
is my certificate.” She pulled it
from a knot in her gut. You tried
to write her a letter on the spot.
You tried to look her in the eyes.
There are things you cannot do
in the forest. You said, “Stay.
Please, sit.” You touched behind her ears.
“It is good. It is good.”
TRAVELING ALTAR BEARING
THE EIGHT AUSPICIOUS GESTURES
1. One Hand Receiving, the Other Guarding the Knee
Gravity, always plump under the atmosphere, welcomes a small cup.
My hand is always small. My knee is warm enough.
2. Pinching in a Passive Fashion
as you would a butterfly or heirloom lace
as you would the earlobe of a sleeping child
3. Elegantly Draped Ring Finger on Otherwise Nonchalant Hand
I was the aristocrat’s first daughter:
when I pumped water from the well, I did so with grace.
4. Left Hand Receptive to the Northern Water Snake
Where I am from the best prayer is a flexible spine.
5. Hands Perched as though above Tangerines
The egg timer is a holy thing,
the bell—a small crisis.
6. Two Clenched Fists
in the folds of an opera cape
7. Holding an Absent Object in the One Remaining Hand
Empty out your devotion: this is the only reasonable approach
to the path between made and unmade.
8. Hand Cascading, as if to Feed Lion
To eat a small thing is to submit entirely to time.
VISCOSITY
Glassy eel of doubt, in the morning
I did too little, unaccustomed to exposure
as a means of preservation. When I took you
in my hands I tore you up and lost my hope.
Eel of doubt at midday, when you made
your way through wet grass I laughed
for you and you wrapped your ventricle vein
around me. I began to suspect
my island was a place to build a life
for us, without trains or commerce.
Only barges ever passed by us
bearing winter’s salt in mountains and in heaps.
Silver eel of evening, by the glaucous hour
I had reversed my stance. The water and the sky
took prominence and my footing
was on nothing in between. My patience
had grown bare. When I looked at the houses
across the bank, I saw them swelter in their goodness.
I know how I must look to you.
If you suggest I’ve made the bed wrong
I’ll believe you. I’ll go for a walk,
welcome the affection of the neighbor’s cat.
When I make the map of us, my long doubt,
I will lay you down feldgrau, without water,
use you as my scale. For someone who knows
what’s right, I have trouble
acting decently without distance.
A BARTER
The white slug of my first promise
makes work of the field mice. Silvers them
in the woods; and—well, you can always bury
them with the ferns if you want.
Propagate more ferns.
My first time: I was five, still
young enough my mother came to me
her face not taut, I rocked her,
volunteered I promise I promise my promise.
My reconstitution to the green lion
and my subsequent attempts to eat the sun, a fool’s progress
across my mother’s body to
the sour milk of time.
The curdling.
Ever since that day
I told them—Slugs,
adorn me for the ferns.
CATECHISM
Summer of getting trashed in the woods
Summer of viscous approach to any problem
Summer of Luna Moth at my gate
Summer of my own damn money
What did the summer carry in itself?
A ransom of feathers that hold
the sum of the day’s light toothed
in place and fully contemplated.
Summer of the belief in my general unimpregnability
Summer of perfect values
Summer of attempted rape on the lawn of someone’s out-of-town parents
Summer of being saved (Mount Hope River, brindled light)
What are the means of ingress?
In equal shares: alcohol, bitterness, beauty.
Put a razor under your tongue and climb the cliff face.
Summer of teaching a boy to take fluids
Summer of Billy running from his ghost, bottle in hand
Summer of running my feet bloody/Summer of eating again
Summer of know your place, bitch
If you were to remove it, what would be the shape of its lack?
The shape of the lack would take one of two forms—
the flame or the rose. But hush
Summer of keep your head down
Summer of honest work
Summer of Ryan falling eight stories onto concrete
Summer he was John Doe
What would your mother say?
My mother would, and did, say I am as a migratory creature
and she is my oyamel fir. My mother, found by magnet and riverbed.
Summer of being told I know a lot about love
Summer of petulant goodbyes
Summer of contraband (Pakistani boot knife, eagle feather, machete in trunk)
Summer of short hems
When summer pinches you by the Achilles and dips you in,
do you submit?
To do so means you accept the inevitability of your own death.
Summer of AM broadcasts and peepers
Summer of bad advice
Summer of busted knuckles
Summer of cherry red
What is the essence and what does it reveal to you?
When you hike it up, you will see your inner rope,
you will see it all work out.
TO SHRIKE
If you ask me to be
I am always hungry for the spindle.
Savage bird, and small,
I am your bread and butter,
your mammal, your anything
with fur. I was self-satisfied.
I was smug in the sweet rot—
even happy, even poor, even
stubborn in my mornings.
My kind can hollow a whole hill. Gnaw
our teeth right in the jaw.
Your own bones take no practice at all.
If I wanted to be
symbolic about it, I’d beg
for the barb of a yew.
We both know I’m game for any sharp thing
when you lift me up.
Meghan Maguire Dahn
Meghan Maguire Dahn grew up in the middle of the woods. She is the author of Domain (forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2022) and the chapbook Lucid Animal (winner of Harbor Review’s Editor’s Prize, 2021). Her first poem was published in Highlights Magazine and read primarily in waiting rooms by children nervous about getting shots or stitches. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, the Iowa Review, the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Small Orange, Bennington Review, the Boog City Reader, Blunderbuss, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Phantom Limb, the Beloit PoetryJournal, Gulf Stream, among others. She was selected for the 2017 Best New American Poets anthology by Natalie Diaz and she was a winner of the 2014 Discovery/92nd Street Y Poetry Prize (judges: Eduardo Corral, Rosanna Warren, Susan Mitchell, and John Ashbery). She was also a finalist for the Akron Poetry Prize, the Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, and the Pamet River Prize. She has an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.