Sara McGuirk

OF WHAT WAS LEFT AFTER EMPTINESS

I made a windowsill & words. I made a lookout
of the highest concrete slab on the parking ramp
                & perched there.

of what was left, I made a mannequin;
she could walk & think
                & wear my clothes.

as if to say, I’ll break you again & again, an ex
of mine once hurled a vase I’d made for her against
                her bedroom wall.

it was robin’s egg blue, the wall.
of what was left, she pieced it
                piece by piece by piece. in a poem

you said you’d snipped the map
like a fate; you called yourself
                piecewise & I was a knife.

like I said, I made a windowsill & words.

& then I cut them. & then I made them
bathe in glass. & then I made them into glass
                like a poppy in a pieced-back vase.

to say: words that wilted
on the windowsill
                would be ridiculous

but that’s what they did.
they wilted.

SARA MCGUIRK currently acts as the Iowa Youth Writing Project Fellow and teaches at The University of Iowa Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English and Film Studies from the University of Notre Dame. She was the winner of the 2017 Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the 2017 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize in Poetry. Sara is currently finishing her first collection, as well as a feature-length screenplay.