Megan Blankenship
Tim. Worm
That winter we went through the hymnal
singing every song with “worm” in the lyrics—
a not insignificant number. “What timorous worms
we mortals are” was such a fine phrase, you said,
they must engrave it on your headstone.
Though there was unlikely to be much money,
so they’d have to abbreviate: Tim. Worm.
Next we tried the Sacred Harp, with its dissonant
so fa las that made us argue. “One of us
will bury the other,” you said, a benediction
on our tenuous union, and maybe it’s so,
though we have since severed.
Now as the yard lights flicker on like oil lamps
in the rotting chests of the saints, the locusts
taking on a minor tone, I declare I cannot go on
living like the world is ending. For we have gone on
living without each other, which sometimes feels
like living where it never rains. All to the good
and so fa la, my tim. worm, my ferocious love
who I vow I will go on burying, whatever remains of me,
unto the last gasp of this tremulous universe.
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Image by David Besh from Pexels
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Megan Blankenship is a poet from the Ozark Mountains. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The Greensboro Review, and other journals, and has been supported by the Arkansas Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and was the 2018 recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, which entailed living in an off-grid cabin in rural Oregon for six months.
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