IN SEARCH OF LIFE
my cat softens in the sun for hours
watching birdtrails and wind wisps outside my window
as sleep overtakes her.
hour by hour,
she lives just enough to survive
between laps of still water;
the clock declares me twenty-five.
this year i finally began to meditate
after a long life of
witnessing the world
through deep and veiled walls,
each one thicker and darker
than the last.
i felt at first the tension in my shoulders,
a gift from genetics
festering wild
in neck cracks and restlessness;
pinpricks rising with
each morning breath.
my body was a living thing,
i knew at last, aching
but true.
only later did i notice
the yawning, the quiet ways
the world has settled in my rhythms.
these days i greet fewer
2 AMs; my lungs shorten,
my skin reddens,
a hollow lamentation rests
at the back of my mind for
the night’s unseen hours—
my body shivers with the guilt
of inertia—a novel left unedited,
bills unpaid, letters unread,
dreams left undreamt—until suddenly i feel it,
this crawling,
this conviction, that in the end
my life will have no narrative.
it will move instead
in fits and starts,
each autumn killing leaves
and every spring blooming anew.
i remember,
still, a dock on a lake:
the smell of pine and summertime,
storm clouds haunting the horizon
as a white sky loomed unaware.
i was lying on my back,
staring deep and directionless
into the emerald unpromise of tomorrow.
i want to give it all back, the knowledge.
i resign;
let me return
the bite of the apple,
let me jigsaw my way out
and ease slowly into the shadows,
the robins, the sandhills, the
daisies, the beetles, the leopards,
the maples, the life that lives
without knowing.
now it is today in a treeless place
and my vision blurs with meaning,
scanning the fallen, unripe fruit
in search of life.
one day, i will flame out
dying hyperlink
with my bones confused
for common ash,
but today at home my cat
knocks over a fake bamboo
after yanking too hard on its branches.
she cowers under the couch
until slowly she forgets,
and i weep.
Nicole Fegan, 26, New Orleans, LA - USA ✯ IG: @nfeegs
“Nicole Fegan is a book editor, poet, logic puzzle maker, and erstwhile art handler currently residing in New Orleans. With a lifelong obsession with memory and nostalgia, she writes poetry that tries to make sense of what the brain chooses to remember. She rejects the Faustian bargain and looks forward to a life of simplicity.”