The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: "Notes on the End of the World" by Meghan Privitello

“Day 16”

I am part mountain,
part ocean.

I am part human
when I see a burnt body
carried into a lake.

I am alive if every minor chord
makes me pen a eulogy
for someone
not yet dead.

I am half mother,
half killer,
which is to say
I am a small woman.

I am part child
if I stay awake
to calculate the number
of balloons it takes
to lift a body
out of its grave.

I am part lover
if every man I’m with
is anonymous,
if I know them
only by the size
of their waist.

I am part factory,
part sane, which is
to say I cannot stop
making mistakes,
which is to say
everything is just so.

This selection comes from the collection Notes on the End of the World, available from Black Lawrence Press. Order your copy here. Our curator for August is Donna Vorreyer.

Meghan Privitello is the author of A New Language for Falling out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015) and Notes on the End of the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), winner of The Black River Chapbook Competition. Poems have appeared in Guernica, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Best New Poets, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, & elsewhere. She is the recipient of a NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013), as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks. She works as a middle school teacher in the Chicago suburbs.