Permission | Meg Shevenock

I walk out of the house composed. The air, a perfect-temperature-bath. The bird song between certain alleys, deafening. The moon boxes my eye with its chalked fist. I remember the chalkboard eraser vacuum in the back of the elementary school cafeteria, how every student would fight to carry the erasers in a light, neat stack to be suctioned, after clapping them outside against the bricks. A strange and simple pleasure, even then, old-fashioned, the way the chalk would mark our forearms, bricks take on ghosts, lungs cough. But how slowly the moon is a line about time I can’t tell. My friend has died. Only two days ago, I sat beside his hospital bed holding a miniature carton of orange juice. The blue plastic germ gloves bunched in my lap. I think of how, despite his coma, he was full of pain he couldn’t describe—we could all see it in his breathing. Still, I couldn’t help the dizziness, or how my head ached, drinking the warm orange juice that was healing, there at the tucked corner of his last bed, where, I believed, if only for my own comfort, he allowed me to be thirsty.

editors’ note: in February, 2021, Meg Shevenock read from her award-winning poetry collection, The Miraculous, Sometimes, over Zoom, and met with UWL students to discuss her writing and visual art practices, as well as abuse, trauma, and recovery.