with him i learn joy watch moana aladdin the version with live actors go camping and he teases me about ice cream dripping flowers flowers flowers everywhere i struggle to catch them in my camera’s eye as light scintillates light sparks light glows making petals pulse trees explode pollen haze and azalea rhododendron it’s ohio in may warm may memorial day and we trek around the swamp stinking and luscious and dark spreading into our sleeping bags between our thighs so that we lose ourselves as we guzzle from the cups of the carnivorous love flowers

and the swamp comes for us vast rich peat with elephant bones sunk deep the mastodons swam here long ago and now their bones give rise to violets in spring tiny blue violets as the swamp exhales and we are on the edge of the swamp eating ice cream and playing with each other and his divorce and my madness no longer matter because the swamp is coming for us the swamp is going to eat my madness the swamp is going to eat his first wife strip us to bone so that we stand naked before each other and perceive each other and there will be no shame no shame and the elephants the wolves sink deep and they sink deep in us too and like swamps we eat each other in this mad dash into the quicksand of love where everything is carnivorous even the flowers even the flies even the swamp even the sky and he laughs at me as the sky chases us down to eat us and there is ice cream everywhere so that i fall in love i fall in love i fall in love with his tenderness his juiciness his red red mouth his bald spot yes even his bald spot eats my heart

*

we leave the swamp return to nights unstarred by silt and ice cream unravel the filthy shameless string the swamp spun between our thighs yet still i promise vow to be good for him good for him always good for him always good for him always always always—

though the old sadness hungers like flies

Meg LeDuc lives in the Detroit area with her husband and works as a marketing and communications manager. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a BA in English, and she attends the MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, CRAFT, and the International Human Rights Art Festival; was anthologized by San Fedele Press in Art in the Time of COVID-19; and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is working on a memoir. Please visit her website at www.megleduc.com