Four Poems by Megan Falley

K
By Megan Falley

In the summer, girls paid her
in cigarettes and hickeys
to shave their heads
on her front porch.

I sat behind her in poetry class
and when she wrote the naked lady
tattooed on her arm writhed.
I tried to name the shade of her hair —
so black it was blue.

She loved Bukowski. Hated herself
in the most beautiful ways — pierced
five or six holes in her face.

One day in class she stole my phone,
punched her number in and saved her name — “k”.
She owned 1/26 of the alphabet.

I read her messages over and over.
They were the first poems.
They were cave paintings.
They were my own palms.

The only time she ever called was 3AM.
I WANT TO KISS YOU RIGHT NOW said her whiskey.
Don’t worry, that’s just something
she tells new friends said her roommate, sober,
snatching the phone.

The world had never given me
the language to say Come close or Yes or I don’t know
how to touch you, let me touch you—so I danced
with a boy that night. He was tall, I think.

I slept beside him, not touching, forgot
his name. But I remembered her hair,
bruise colored. How the dye left a spot
behind her ear. How it ruined nothing
but me.

The Day Amanda Realized She Was A Lesbian
By Megan Falley

she pulled me into the laundry room,
mascara spilling down her graduation dress.

Her High School sweetheart — a lover
of Pearl Jam, hockey and monogamy — clueless
on the other side of the door.

I asked why she waited until graduation
to become a lesbian when we spent the past four years
at a liberal arts college known for its Kombucha and girls

braiding each other’s armpit hair on the Ultimate Frisbee Quad.
We’d done everything together: dyed our hair the same
shade of Manic Panic. Guarded the door for each other while touching

strange men in bar bathrooms. Told the same tequila secrets
to the same plastic wastebaskets. Shared a twin bed.
We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry — but I held her

the way I always held her.
How could we not have known?

I slid down the snowy hill on a dining hall lunch tray
only after she braved it. She chewed the mushroom stem
only after I swallowed mine.

We unlocked each other
like middle school diaries,

and so I called the girl
whose green eyes followed me across campus
for seven semesters and say Take me

somewhere

and in the garden, she kissed me
so soft, I grew
a new eyelash.

Telling Him I Kissed A Woman
By Megan Falley

I cut the pill of truth
and served it with honey.
A half-lie, I said

we were drunk.

Painted us starved,
in dresses of gin, egged
on by the barstools.

Painted myself stumbling
onto her face,
more so than an actual kiss.

Painted it as if cameras were rolling.
An image he could beat
off to, instead of curse. Said

it meant nothing

And how could it?
I was straight
as a wedding aisle.

I touched
his beard. Begged him
to stay. Insisted

it was only a kiss

and hoped he wouldn’t hear it
in my voice, how it sounded like

it was only a decade.
It was only a war.

I didn’t say there was no bar,
no audience except
the magnetic poetry falling

to the floor as she pressed me
up against the refrigerator, beaming.

That I felt more in that
one kiss than anytime he thrust
his tongue down my throat,

or wouldn’t get a condom,
or wanted it facedown.
I swore

it will never happen again.

He called me a whore.

I said

I love you.

He called me a bitch.
I said

yes.

Alibi
By Megan Falley

“Danish Man Aquitted of Sexual Assaults Because He was Asleep, Suffers from ‘Sexsomnia.’” –NY Daily News

Why isn’t there a disease
where you do something useful
in your sleep — maybe file my taxes?
Caulk the bathtub?
I need a pedicure. Need to fix this
unibrow. Finish that manuscript.
Can’t you help with that?

I’ve suddenly contracted a sleep-punching disease.
I’m going to cuddle up next to everyone
who believes this shit.
In my disease I tie balloon animals
out of scrotums.

It’s okay. I’m sleeping.
I don’t want to be held
accountable either.

It’s funny your disease manifested itself
at thirty-one years old when you had a pair
of teenage girls in your home.
Curious it didn’t haunt you
on your camping trip
with Grandpa.

If I had affliction where I unconsciously shoved
a pistol into the mouths of people
I loved, I’d tell them:

look, I do this thing
in the night—it might kill you,
but it isn’t me.

Except I’d know
it was me.

I’d sleep in a crypt.
I’d cut off
my own hands.