meghan o'rourke

Lately, I've been carrying around Meghan O'Rourke's poems as a sort of amulet. There's her stirring collection Halflife and countless other poems that crop up in the New Yorker, Poetry, Gulf Coast, etc. As a recent NYU Creative Writing grad, I saw O'Rourke at the Writer's House all the time as she worked with the poets. Unfortunately I was unaware of her skill at the time and the only conversation we ever had involved me complimenting her outfit as we waited for hot water to boil in the kitchen.

First, here's an excerpt from the poem Palimpsest in Half Life:

"I talk to my friends more than I used to.
I sleep less. That is the point of life:
you really care."

Here are a few full on poems by Meghan O'Rourke. Enjoy!

Apartment Living

So those despotic loves have become known to you,
rubbing cold hands up your thighs, leaving oily trails,
whispering, Just how you like it, right?
Upstairs the sorority girls are playing charades
again, smoking cigarettes, wearing shifts, burning
pain into their synapses.
Life is a needle. And now it pricks you:
the silver light in which you realize
your attempts at decadence
tire the earth and tire you. The etymology
of "flag" as in "signal to stop"
is unknown. It is time to sit and watch. Don't
call that one again, he's pitiless in his self-certainty.
You used to be so.
You laid your black dress on the bed.
You stepped in your heels over sidewalk cracks.
You licked mint and sugar from the cocktail mixer,
singing nonsense songs,
and the strangers, they sang along.

-- From The New Yorker

Late Mastery

So this is happiness: a flaxen, spoiling moon;
blindfolds; teasing, catastrophic fantasies.
Three weights of darkness:
a switch, a flick, a strike. My hands cold
beneath the duck-print eiderdown. That menagerie.
I do not like the sound of bedclothes
sliding to the wax-slick floor.
I do not like your body elsewhere.
And I do not like love, that narrow street,
along which children who play at the gate
disappear for days to return with a smile,
lighting matches in the grass
as if to smell--again--the sulfur.

From HalfLife