Meg Kearney


Heart Quartet


And what emotional impulse leads you
to speak of the heart, that cliché, its chamber
for sleeping, for weeping, and remember
the chamber for repair—of course you do;
something’s always broken, in need of glue
or stitches, penitent kisses, or—stranger—
a pericardial window to release the flood waters
rising as you write. Last, there is the room you
pay a price to enter, that private hall
the rising torrent will someday breach,
which you will do your best to deny
(This isn’t how things end—this won’t be all!)
until the heart—stillness its new-found niche,
no longer cares about the when or the why.

In the store: The Ice Storm by Meg Kearney

photo: Gabriel Parker

Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows—winner of the 2020 Washington Prize and Silver Medalist in Foreword Review’s Indies Book Awards—made Small Press Distribution’s poetry bestseller list April through September, 2021. Meg is author of a heroic crown of sonnets titled The Ice Storm, as well as the collections An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award. She has also published three verse novels for teens and an award-winning picture book, illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac;” it was also included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology. A native New Yorker, she lives in New Hampshire and is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University in Massachusetts.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2024