Clare Flanagan
Image by Jan Koetsier from Pexels
Clare Flanagan is a Brooklyn-based poet, music writer, and night owl. Raised in Minnesota, she recently relocated from San Francisco to New York City, where she is a Wiley Birkhofer fellow at NYU. Her poems and reviews are published or forthcoming in Poetry Online, Pidgeonholes, the McNeese Review, and Treble Zine, among others. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, long-distance running, and listening to Charli XCX.
Inheritance
I get two little fingers that look
like they’re broken. Metatarsals
that make snapping noises when
I walk. A femur turned inward,
shredded hip fascia, tilted
kneecap striking tendon like
flint. I get my grandmother’s
lips, her prominent teeth, which
she chain-smoked pale yellow,
waking late in the night
to light up. I get it. The first time
I get drunk, I think no feeling
can touch this. I am right
but also wrong, which happens
a lot, because my brain is full
of bad static. Close lightning.
Seconds between the rumble
and the flash. Sometimes, snatches
of a song I remember, about
a house the size of a thunderhead,
one room for every person
I’ve ever loved. Nobody
gets that. Most people don’t
get shit. I’ll be lucky
to get my parents’ acre, hillside
of brush, kitchen window
where I stood, still a child,
thinking if this is my life
why continue. It made no sense.
Everything I saw was beautiful –
pale cirrus. Maple sapling netting
the boundless sky. My father
crouched at the property line,
clipping back buckthorn, flame-
bright sumac. His mother had tried
to die, and he forgave her, but I didn’t
know that yet. I just stayed there,
staring through the feeling, until
I could recognize the world again.
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