Rhiannon McGavin
Rhiannon McGavin has failed the California driver’s license test three times. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Teen Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, and more. She is the author of Branches and Grocery List Poems (Not a Cult). Her Irish and UK editions will be published next year by Doomsday Press.
ars instapoetica
Despite the reports, baby girl, you have not killed
literature with your uptalk, your online diary, the rooms
you built from words inside the black & white glow of
your palm. You deserve each letter
& the space to sound them out. Here is your city
of stanzas. You can decide every ribcage is
a bird’s nest, a full moon. Walk at night anyplace
you want, the street lamps are reserved for you
to weep under. Every window you pass beams
with another girl’s pulse, your windows linked
together, the wires crossing your neighborhoods
like a cat’s cradle, a thousand thousand arms
reaching through the globe.
The audits said
it’s overplayed to sit & cry on the fire escape,
mascara running a slow mile on your cheeks,
but fire escapes help you escape fire, whatever
you want to call the burning in your days.
You post the names from the railings
so everyone else can hear it too.
Staircase wit
It’s spring & everyone’s joking
about killing themselves again. You’re getting better
at moving through different cities without your eyes
tapped to the blue dot of your being
on the phone’s map. Anywhere you go
it seems you just missed the cherry blossoms,
dead receipts of petals on the ground,
but you’ve never had a cleaner sense
of direction. You’ve got a face to make
in the mirror to check that you’re cute,
a preferred way to transcribe your laughter
over text. You’re at the age where you explain your politics
naked about once a week. You are of the age
where the mass murderers also grew up
with mass murder drills. Traces of carbon-14
thread the cells of everybody you’ve ever known
& everybody you’ll never meet because you’re alive
in the same world as atom bombs. Born as you were
into real life at the top of the century, the future’s headlines
rise as water or ash or something else hard
to breathe through. You know what to say now.
You’ve heard it’s too late.
Self-portrait with your leftover hair
Every time, my Gd, like
I’ve been delicately
mauled by a werewolf
like there’s a telephone cord
wrapped around my arm
down the lengths
of my legs, typewriter ribbons
and tuxedo threads teased
into spirals until anyone can see
that I am your tipsy maypole
that every black apple stem
twisted while reciting
the alphabet to find
the name of your future
lover ended up
under my blouse
along with the alphabet
in ink and the bumblebee
stripes of your stubble
and all the licorice curlicues
on a topographic map
to mark just how deep
this ocean goes
Yes yes even when I wash
my own hair, I find
these muddy tomato sprouts
tangled on the shower wall,
cursive in a language
I am learning
again I sound out
the dark scrawl of your postcards Wish
you were here you were here
Every time I find these cypress shadows
and what sticks to you when I leave? The same webs of sun?