Miceala Morano
Miceala Morano (she/her) is a teen writer whose work is published or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, The Lumiere Review, Hooligan Magazine, and more. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and she was recently named a Foyle Commended Poet by the Poetry Society of the UK, as well as Arkansas Scholastic Press Association's 2021 Literary Magazine Writer of the Year. Find her at micealamorano.carrd.co.
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dissections
CW: Mentions of blood, references to death
In the summer, you gently pull
the frogs from the pond,
palms against soft underbelly,
hands shaded in green water.
I think of how dissection
opens the heart.
What I will remember: tenderness, the salt of summer
sweat and not tears or blood. My heart worked
only for me to love you and implode. Only for a minute
was I alive. All I recall is the blue iris of the lake as I dove.
Not the yellow line of the road, the thud like a skipped beat,
or the moon paling my skin. I pulled your body
from the pavement, wrapped you in my coat
and wore your blood. I carried you to the river.
I think baptism goes like this: God finds us
In a last breath, half-drowned by His hand, and then
gives it all back. How the return of knives to each other’s necks
feels like mercy. How we check each other’s hearts for blood.
I held you tenderly in the spaces between
life and death
car seat and floor
here and here
each flashing memory
cradled heartbeats in my ribcage
Until they were yours, resuscitation a prayer gone
to voicemail, In all my dreams, forgiveness.
None of the salt and all of the river.
None of the drowning and all of the gods.
Here, something gives out, your neck
tilting sideways onto the glass.
You look half-asleep in this light, beautiful
In this light, it is dark and you are here
And here is a lost signal, a false definition.
Here was you. The moment the car hit,
The radio skipped your favorite song.
I could feel my heart pause,
waiting for yours to echo.
How with all living things,
we kill them
trying to find their heartbeat.
In the summer, you gently pull
the frogs from the pond,
palms against soft underbelly,
hands shaded in green water.
I think of how dissection
opens the heart.
What I will remember: tenderness, the salt of summer
sweat and not tears or blood. My heart worked
only for me to love you and implode. Only for a minute
was I alive. All I recall is the blue iris of the lake as I dove.
Not the yellow line of the road, the thud like a skipped beat,
or the moon paling my skin. I pulled your body
from the pavement, wrapped you in my coat
and wore your blood. I carried you to the river.
I think baptism goes like this: God finds us
In a last breath, half-drowned by His hand, and then
gives it all back. How the return of knives to each other’s necks
feels like mercy. How we check each other’s hearts for blood.
I held you tenderly in the spaces between
life and death
car seat and floor
here and here
each flashing memory
cradled heartbeats in my ribcage
Until they were yours, resuscitation a prayer gone
to voicemail, In all my dreams, forgiveness.
None of the salt and all of the river.
None of the drowning and all of the gods.
Here, something gives out, your neck
tilting sideways onto the glass.
You look half-asleep in this light, beautiful
In this light, it is dark and you are here
And here is a lost signal, a false definition.
Here was you. The moment the car hit,
The radio skipped your favorite song.
I could feel my heart pause,
waiting for yours to echo.
How with all living things,
we kill them
trying to find their heartbeat.
Commentary
Miceala on “dissections”:
“dissections” is, at its core, a poem about the intense fear of causing harm to those you love through your actions. When writing the poem, I hoped to talk about how love, no matter what type, makes us vulnerable to and even accepting to that harm, while still displaying the fear that comes alongside it.
The piece consists of three parts, and the middle one was created to slice a very brief moment in two and display the fear of causing harm through the use of a highly catastrophic event. I wanted to show how heavily this fear weighs on our perception of all things, switching between lighter and darker imagery to rapidly move the reader between the present moment and the hypothetical. I wanted to include snapshots of moments you would typically see in the night in the heat of summer (bodies immersed in water, spontaneous midnight car rides) and see just how far I could use language and metaphor to twist the reader’s perception of what is real in love and what is manufactured by the mind in situations of fear or desperation.
Assistant Editor Belinda Munyeza on “dissections”:
Right from the beginning, “dissections” caught my attention with the lines “I think of how dissection / opens the heart,” which seems to promise an immensely layered exploration of violence and grief. Mixing vividly poignant imagery with soft language, “dissections” delivers on this promise in a poetic space where tenderness can co-exist with pain, beauty can co-exist with gruesomeness, and all of it happens without one necessarily needing to resolve the other. The poem is a complex narrative in which the speaker’s experience forces us to examine the spaces between life and death, regret and forgiveness, holding on and letting go, and so much more.
“dissections” is, at its core, a poem about the intense fear of causing harm to those you love through your actions. When writing the poem, I hoped to talk about how love, no matter what type, makes us vulnerable to and even accepting to that harm, while still displaying the fear that comes alongside it.
The piece consists of three parts, and the middle one was created to slice a very brief moment in two and display the fear of causing harm through the use of a highly catastrophic event. I wanted to show how heavily this fear weighs on our perception of all things, switching between lighter and darker imagery to rapidly move the reader between the present moment and the hypothetical. I wanted to include snapshots of moments you would typically see in the night in the heat of summer (bodies immersed in water, spontaneous midnight car rides) and see just how far I could use language and metaphor to twist the reader’s perception of what is real in love and what is manufactured by the mind in situations of fear or desperation.
Assistant Editor Belinda Munyeza on “dissections”:
Right from the beginning, “dissections” caught my attention with the lines “I think of how dissection / opens the heart,” which seems to promise an immensely layered exploration of violence and grief. Mixing vividly poignant imagery with soft language, “dissections” delivers on this promise in a poetic space where tenderness can co-exist with pain, beauty can co-exist with gruesomeness, and all of it happens without one necessarily needing to resolve the other. The poem is a complex narrative in which the speaker’s experience forces us to examine the spaces between life and death, regret and forgiveness, holding on and letting go, and so much more.