TEGAN BEARD - POEMS

Tegan Beard is, in no particular order, an undergraduate student at Western Washington University, Poetry Editor of Jeopardy Magazine, and an avid user of compound words. You can find her reading Louise Glück in the sun somewhere.

TULSA INTERNATIONAL
​

​in the middle seat, elbows tuck into ribcage,
peanuts rattle off tray table to carpet,
 
navy with crimson spots - blood, boutonniere.
when i called you, dead-weight fingers
 
gouged in rust-blue phone cord,
i was thinking about the emergency  
 
landing in oklahoma, the man who couldn’t breathe
at thirty thousand feet, the flight attendants
 
a rolling boil around him. there is the truth,
and here is the romance: i want to be somebody
 
you’d land a plane for.
maybe if that woman is window-seat kind,
 
she will let you lean over and
scan the blackened river-veins for me --
 
always i will be on the runway, orange
wedge smile, signaling your
 
wheels to asphalt,
fists full of technicolor.
 
 

SINGLE MAGPIE IN GLITTER
​

​TEN YEARS
age ten, i began sucking stones,
meatballs and olive pits of agate.
the beach a bursting maraca,
tulle rustling beneath my sneakers.
i chose only terrestrial
bulbs, ones with rivers, tie-dyed
whirlwinds, like the patchwork quilt
of earth i’ve seen from space.
 
HUNGRY YEARS
online, i read about pica, the curiosity
of tasting to understand. my mouth open
to the world, still, when i am
astounded. wanting to be full
of earth, mineral, grace, to pile enough shine
into my belly that i might refract.
i read that youth breeds pica, and stay
childlike in hunger, clattering marbles
down my windpipe for safekeeping.
 
LOUD-BONED YEARS
magpie skull looks like the cogs of a watch pica pica eats anything — rocks and rivers and time — pica pica is magpie and magpie       is death — magpie means stop chattering     fill         your  mouth
with pebbles — magpie, magma, i can’t tell the difference anymore: something
is erupting — all these rocks weren’t here before / i think / this / is earth from space
a swollen throb of papier mache and tempera paint /
dangling off ceiling / with fishing line.
 
 

HOLLOW / BURSTING
​

shot glass of glass shards, fluorescent tube split and shaken and stirred. house cluttered with strangers, eyes spark-thick, bellies all aslosh. i was eighteen, then. i was eighteen, then, when i met you. now i have something to prove, i think, so i invite you to a bar i have never heard of. this is a story within a story, a story within the pebbled ridges of my cup. if i hold it this way, under the bar light shiny-thick as aloe vera, you will see the words fragmented there. forgive me if the language isn’t right. i’ll translate if you need me to, but i think you can guess what i’m saying. you ask if i drank a lot of wine last spring, and i say i drank everything. i was all appetite, no girl. my mother used to say that my brother inherited my grandpa’s hollow leg: he would stand up from the dinner table only to sit right back down. all the food tumbled to his ankle, his gut agape again. in the spring i was cavernous, yawning, swallowing flavors whole. there was nothing i wouldn’t try, just once: beef broth, peach schnapps, goulash, the truth. forgive me, the story within the story within my appendix is bursting, and now i have to tell it to you. i was eighteen, then — there are some things i wouldn’t try a second time — i am twenty-one now — there are some things i will  never   stop wanting.
 
 

NOT YOUR FATHER’S BREAD RECIPE
​

​step one:
dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water: let stand: i
stand in winter water to my knees / i stand
in irish butter to my waist, gold foil shrapnel pasting
the over\risen edges of my bellybutton
 
step two:
whisk, stir, blend, combine: dictionary dot com says these are synonyms because they have the same or nearly the same meaning: dictionary dot com would have me believe that boundaries can be broken, that whisking two things will make them one. i say i don’t believe in combination and you have nothing to prove me wrong
 
step three:
form soft dough, knead until smooth: soft, knead, smooth, use your hands to break things down: break things down for me: you liked me better when i was soft, my skin butter smooth, my self ready to dissolve, only needing you
 
step four:
this is where it gets
counterintuitive / break it
down for me
again: cover in tea towel, wedding-dress bleached /
let rise in warm place
once doubled
punch down.
once doubled
hurt
 
step five:
double again,
spread butter into cradle
and tuck in,
thundercloud flesh.
bake until saffron shelled,
not long enough to
lightning at the seams.
 
step six:
you point to the bursting / surge
over sea-wall
and tell me this is combination
\
i am loaf, i am lightning:
i arc my fingers into heart-curve and
split