Livia Meneghin, Boston-New York, USA
After Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?”
and Terrance Hayes’ “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
If by real you mean as real as a ladybug
climbing up your shirt with six badges
dotting determination on its back,
or as real as the tattered eyes of birches
lining a lake, watching—then yes,
every last page is true, every line, image,
and confession. Every she. Every green.
But they aren’t factual, no. Imagine
spending so much time in love, all those
trees and long walks, collecting violets
to fill vases of petals as bees and butterflies
come out from hiding spots, being kissed
from sun up to far past dusk, when finally,
the little red beetle reaches your lips.
Livia Meneghin is a current MFA candidate and writing instructor at Emerson College. She is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair. Her individual poems and reviews have found homes in The Academy of American Poets, tenderness lit, Entropy Magazine, Tinderbox, So to Speak, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.