by Meghan Kemp-Gee
People are painting pictures of flowers, still
lives and so on, and elsewhere people
are finding twenty-thousand-year-old footprints
made by giant sloths. You can’t put a
flower on a page like a footprint but you
can draw your own heart there, the red walls
and open atriums flowering like your
pulse in a fresh cut, like life will not
open your sunflowers, your snapdragons, your
bad memory, slow steps, blue paint on
canvas on your fingerprints on the toes and
claws of twenty-thousand-year-old feet.
Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of THE ANIMAL IN THE ROOM (2023) and WHAT I MEANT TO ASK: A CHAPBOOK (2022). She also co-created CONTESTED STRIP, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee (and soon to be a graphic novel, ONE MORE YEAR).
Emerge Literary Journal 