I Do Everything I'm Told

by Megan Fernandes

To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth. A good city will not parent you. Every poet has a love affair with a bridge. Mine is the Manhattan and she’s a middle child.

It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you. It takes time to build an ethics. Go slow. Wellness is a myth and shame transforms no one. You can walk off most anything.

In the end, your role is to attend to the things you like and ask for more of it: Bridges. Ideas. Destabilization. Yellow tansy. Cities. The wild sea. And in the absence of recovery, some ritual. In the absence of love? Ritual. Understand that ritual is a kind of patience, an awaiting and waiting. Keep waiting, kitten. You will be surprised what you can come back from.

Facing the end, you don’t want someone with you for comfort. You want someone with you to blame.

Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.

What should I say to him? That I admire his audacity to be ill? That he knows to be ill is natural given the state of this world, and how is everyone not ill, not overdosing on the night? Because the nukes are coming. Our optimism is not enough to make it not so. Our optimism is all we have. Well, that and beauty.

One must look for signs to believe in them.

How boring to accumulate love only to test it.

I cast beloveds. I kill them off, too, because the muse is mostly a bloodless tool. A plot device. Don’t take it personally. A device isn’t personal, but my blue wound plus yours? It could be exquisite in the right weather, in the right city.

I know how much you dig genius and exceptions. And someone who breaks a rule to love you.

In love, the rules are meant to be broken.

You scare men and gods and joke all women pay for the sins of fathers, even if they aren’t our fathers or sins. You insist bad weather is a gift. Rain gathers in.

A poet does not have enough mercy for all the people who really need it.

The cruelest person we love is the first.

Do you know what aisle they sell dignity,

Children have no dignity and I really admire that about them. I love their ruthless response to injustices, their desire to feed birds in the park. To grieve the sea. Their right to be tired in public. Do you sell dignity here?

I want everything as cheap and damaged as this feeling.

To be taken apart is as important as being put together. Near-annihilation reminds you of a limit and ask yourself, who do you trust at your limit?

I touch what I think is your hand in the afterlife and recall the story of your mom, newly divorced, tucking you into bed on New Year’s Eve in Oregon. Your little brother, too. You choked imagining her lonely countdown and how you had slept so well through her despair.

But Eurydice’s tomb was lousy with my amours, and they mused, armored my girl with indifferent blooms. Until Eurydice said: no more. She didn’t turn back to Hades’s door. Not all descent is doom. Down there, she heard it all before. And I break no one. No more.

I think of the myths where men drown and women sit in the waiting rooms of the underworld. See, I think Orpheus knew. Had always planned to turn back and homegirl knew, too. That’s a kind of smart. To know what you know. To know what your man can and will do and how it will be later told.

Baby, I’m Circe. I hold down the island. I don’t drown my own men in the sea. I tidy up the underworld, and down here there’s a tunnel to hell where we wave, each to each. We bury waterlogged peaches, deep. We refuse to die in this underneath. When the detective breaks in and asks which way he went, I take a drag or sip. I pivot, indifferent. I curtsey, ankles in check. I know how to turn around. I know who waits in this clockless eternity and who is allowed to drown.

Easier to blame the world falling apart than to say it’s you. Only a rookie admits the source of pain. Instead, I rage. I fade.

Venice has no streetwear, I say, everyone here looks like a widow. It always looks like a Sunday. Really, I’m being defensive about dressing like an American so I stick hard to stereotypes.

Plum bodies so fragrant, they make me cry and here I am, tearing over tomatoes, jetlagged, lagging, delaying everything, with at least three churches in view. We’re surrounded by time and god. It makes children of all of us. And I am not a stupid child. Before I left, I gathered my breath and for what? Some grand gesture. No. We keep our heads down. We study the feet of medieval saints. We make small talk against the big year of our absence from each other.

I said, okay. I said, if you are the bomb then I am the bait. I said, if I am saved by three wise men, what will this cost me? Will I have to drop to my knees? Because no man gives salvation away for free.

Because when I heard no one is coming to save me, I held you close like a good woman. Like all the women before me who know what destroys and remakes, and what is destroyed in the remaking.

Why do I believe in any land that tells me it is holy?

I’m in love with you. With anyone who can make a home of brevity or insist on a new season for their birth. Come see me in Vienna, you say. And I do. Because I believe so much in being led.

In Venice, there is always drama around the corner and this city is all corners and decay. You give me that cathedral feeling and wipe rain from blooms of jasmine shrubs on my arm while I speak to Giovanni about Italian boxing.

The world has gone milky and endangered and I’m swallowing. I’m swallowing it all.

My sister has bathed and bagged the dead. She is not tortured by a bad melody, instead, she’d prefer pain not be glamorous or candlelit or ironic or theater. She knows that not everything holy has to hurt or cohere.

I want evidence that you, too, suffered, my generosity run dry or maybe really wasn’t there in the first place.

I told him he was easy to love and he started to cry, confessed no one ever said that before. The truth is that he could, like all of us, be hard to love sometimes. But he wasn’t that night. Which is why I said it.

I was so sad out west. The truth is I am most exquisite on the east coast, meaning I am in rhythm. I do not track the world by beauty but joy.

Yes. It was joy, wasn’t it? Even if it was ugly, it was joy.