Long Overdue Catchup

A new poem about the things we really mean.

Long Overdue Catchup

How is work?
How are you spending your days?
Tell me, is your mind sated, or starved?
Tell me if you worry you have not chosen well, drip drops of chance spilled onto the table, wasted pours for your distraction by shinier things, easier things.
Tell me: during long nights of loathing, stumbling about in the dark, lost, what constellations did you see in that inky sky?
(Tell me, do you look up at the sky anymore?)
Tell me what it feels like when your spirit longs.

How are the kids?
What are the things that keep you up at night?
Tell me: has your mother’s voice yet erupted from your throat, admonishments that once made you cringe raining fresh upon your children?
Tell me of your joy, incandescent, seeing your beating heart outside your chest, running towards you with shoes on the wrong feet.
Tell me—no, show me—where it hurts in your body, where the exhaustion has settled like sticky cake batter.
Tell me what you fear you are not getting right.

How have you been feeling?
What lurks in your body that you are not tending to?
Tell me how the years have accrued in your limbs, if they have rusted the joints or stripped away tissue.
Tell me what is unraveling.
Tell me, have you ever seen this before, and is it normal?
Tell me how you are afraid you will die.

How are you?
Tell me what you mean by good.
Tell me what lives beneath OK.

Credits

Original poem by Victoria McGinley. Photo by Joakim Nådell.

2 Comments

  1. 11.1.23
    Taylor said:

    seeing your IG post and reading this (then coming to read more) has left me in a world of emotions – so glad I found your blog decades ago and am now again as a mother and a whole “new” person.
    your writing is just <3

    • 11.2.23
      Victoria said:

      Thank you, Taylor. The years go on and so do we (though I suspect our mutual love of Bravo will never change).

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