NOW MY LOVE GLOWS inside me and by that I mean its DNA: a warning or a semaphore to my soul that always thought, deep down, it could do without the body. This is the way I learned to expand first the left lung, then the right: first the upper lobe, then the middle, wait wait. Then the whole chest cave. I learned carapace and I learned plastron and I learned I have, in fact, neither. I learned to love contrasts: children pushed on swings by their grandparents. One who loves, one who doesn’t. I know what I wished for at the heart of the labyrinth and I know what it smelled like: the pink and purple milkweed flower, blown open in a northeast wind.
Megan Leonard lives and works in New Hampshire. You can find more of her poetry in Sun’s Skeleton, Poems by Sunday, Glitterpony, Puerto del Sol and The Bellevue Literary Review.