Poetry: Selections from Marie McGrath

What’s Worse Than Going On A Dinner Date with A Cannibal?

Going on two dinner dates with a cannibal

is not something I feel great about. Good story, though.

All was going well the first time, regular

(non-human) meal, then back to mine

for the kind of fuck that makes you believe

it could be good with a bit of practice, then

the usual flirtatious but also awkward pillowtalk.

He said, let’s trade secrets. I said, okay, let me think.

Medium-long silence, then, You start. He paused

not quite long enough before saying

I want to eat a human heart and brain.

His fingers, as he said this, were doodling

stars and swirls around my nipple.

I said nothing. One day, he qualified,

laughing, and not yours, as if I should also laugh.

I swallowed and said Okay,

I only watch girl-on-girl porn,

all too aware of the (appetizing?)

volume of my thrumming heart.

He left a bit later and I ate terrible, cold pizza

standing half-naked in the refrigerator light,

wondering on rubbery mozzarella

if he had eaten the other organs already,

if there was a hierarchy of human consumption,

the pinnacle of which is the heart and brain.

The second date was much the same, pretty boring,

even with the thought that, at some point

in the evening, I could be killed and eaten

(hopefully in that order). Call me tomorrow,

he’d said after. I did not, but sometimes

I pull up his number and compose texts,

daring myself to press send. Raw or cooked?

What kind of mind would you like to eat?

What kind of heart? And What makes you sure?

Which of course, is to say, Why not mine?

Thrift

I buy a dress at a thrift shop in town

and imagine that, once, it was yours,

that it hangs on my body as it hung

from yours, and it fits, though my body

wanes where yours waxes; the dress falls

differently but just as well,

or perhaps not.

Perhaps you never wore it,

but I imagine you will see me

in it and say nothing, the cotton

covering us both like a sheet

so that we might touch.

Ellipse

When the girl I used to love becomes pregnant,

I have a feeling so tidal that I think, damn,

do I want a pregnant wife, the planet of her

awesome and incomprehensible as she grows

toward her own reverberation of that first big birth,

the one from which everything is still drifting off into space.

I want to give her a bath, my wife, and then our child,

a prayer for the flesh I am soaping. Even now I am moved by just the hypothetical, pulled close to tears,

and would be every minute of those months

where my (my!) two most precious living things

were one, and then every month after that, too,

gladly revolving around them, peripheral as a satellite.

You, Too?

Drunk,

sharing a bed

with a man

whom I have loved

like a brother for

nearly ten years.

He reaches around

and fills his hand

with my breast.

Perhaps he’s asleep,

perhaps in a dream.

in any case,

I move gently away

and he grumbles, or

perhaps I misheard

(it was hard to hear)

why, his voice is thick

with booze or sleep

as he says it,

are you making

such a big deal of this?

I convince myself

it was imagined

and snuggle back up,

shredded in my

stomach, learning

again, that no man

is a safe place; even

you, too, can take

a slice for yourself,

perhaps asleep

perhaps in a dream,

without even knowing

what you’ve done or how

I needed that sliver of self,

how if many more are taken

I’ll be all shard.

Marie McGrath (she/her) is a poet from Miami. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in Subtropics, Poet Lore, Scrivener Creative Review, and others. When not writing, she runs a non-profit and co-hosts the podcast Spare Time. She lives in Washington, D.C with her girlfriend and their two tiny cats.