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Origin Calling

By Meg Day

In the dangerous years
everyone took lovers

but us. We were not
sweethearts because

there was no sugar &
we could not honey

without the bees. Dates
made little sense without

time to keep us, beloved
& babe stretched end

to end with nothing
in between. We rang

for each other instead
with rumors & commands,

passwords to watchword
beyond the planet’s mute:

Alright, comrade. If-then,
constable. O general, O god, 

O yes, Operator, did you hear
who disappeared that summer?

We beckoned one another
in riddles hucked casually

over business & in bread
lines, & when we could not

use our mouths, we finally
learned to use our hands.

 

 

 

Listen as Meg Day reads "Origin Calling."
Added: Tuesday, April 16, 2019  /  First published in "Foglifter." Used with permission.
Meg Day

Meg Day is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Pennsylvania. Please, visit the poet’s website.

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