Ophelia

by Meghan Malachi

I’ve optioned to die towards the sky.

What I leave: a building, hot mouth. 

See it: a rose at the hem of agency. 

Tell it: We lived to bedeck the life of a hundred humdrum men.

I’m the heroine. I’m the heroine. 

I won’t be left to hold love’s screeching child.

They’ll position me somewhere between holy and unholy.

All I wanted: to flirt with mud and beauty.

Unhitch my lace from the offshoot. 

You’ve learned to break language because of me —

you owe me this much.

Meghan Malachi is a poet and educator from the South Bronx, New York. She is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor's Prize Contest and a 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her first chapbook, The Autodidact, was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press.