Megan McDermott

by Megan McDermott

after Julia Margaret Cameron’s “2d. version study after the Elgin Marbles”, 1867

where contestants had to pretend to be living
statues, staying very still as pigeons landed
on their heads and arms. What grand traditions
of mimicry! Women mimicking sculptures
mimicking women – layers of pretend.
Here, these women, long dead, are young
forever, invulnerable to jostling or knocked
off limbs or even interruption from the husbands
and children that likely came later. Maybe
we aspire to be statuesque because we dream
of human appearance freed from our defining
places, times, and people. Though of course
these women aren’t alone, but solid in togetherness,
in softness. The touch of their bodies – I would
never think of marble. There is something liquid
even in memorialized life.

Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Richmond, Virginia. Her first full-length collection, Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, was published by Fernwood Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Woman as Communion (Game Over Books) and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating (Ethel Zine and Micro-Press). Her poems have been published in a variety of journals, including the Maine Review, Amsterdam Review, U.S. Catholic, and more. She is a first-year MFA student in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Connect with her at meganmcdermottpoet.com.

by Megan McDermott

You agonize over the list
of my must-haves: sex,
relationship, rings, the end
of weekly succession of birth control
patches smoothed onto body parts
(abdomen, butt cheek, upper arm,
back of shoulder), a point
in career conducive to maternity
leave, a home, a plan, a decision
to befriend things that can’t
be resolved, like fears
for a country or a planet.

Already there are so many dooms
you’d rather your hypothetical
children never know but no doom
defines like the prospect you
might only ever be a wisp
in a soul busied with other identities.
You’ve doomed me, you accuse.
To reside in the theoretical;
to mother longing instead of flesh;
to mother metaphors; to be one.

You beg: At least freeze
your eggs, do something.
And I tell you we have time,
cite my mother eight years
older at the time of our birth
than we are right now, though
at thirty-eight she’d already
had one child and sixteen years
if marriage. Still, I tell you
a lot can change in eight years.

Or nothing changes.
I’m sorry I wish more than plan.

In my own way, I am generous
if I keep you from your dream.
I’ll stay the one who loses while
you are kept safe from stakes
much higher than the grief
of what-ifs.

Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. Her first full-length poetry collection, Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, came out this year from Fernwood Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Woman as Communion (Game Over Books) and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating (Ethel). Connect with her on Twitter @megmcdermott92 or at meganmcdermottpoet.com.