Poetry: “Pre-” by Maureen Morris
“I am clutching tight to every / pre-bombing, every pre-drug-induced nosedive. / The pre-dawn ghost of my dead cat jamming her head / against my calf in a figure eight, gray ears flattening alternately.”
In this poem, Maureen Morris uses the prefix “pre” as a catalyst to dig deeper into nostalgia and what it really means to reminisce.
Pre-
after Corey van Landingham
liminal anguish brought on by searing
October, by moonlessness, preparation for a sky
large and pitch. I am clutching tight to every
pre-bombing, every pre-drug-induced nosedive.
The pre-dawn ghost of my dead cat jamming her head
against my calf in a figure eight, gray ears flattening alternately.
I watch the pre-Internet die out in the ember in my mother’s
eyes, replaced by the reflection of Tom Cruise deep fakes.
Preoccupy myself with the truth: everyone is on the precipice
of absurdity; teenagers pre-gaming the protest and
pouring one out for the dead on film, on cracked screen.
Pre-traumatic. Pre-war is a real estate selling point for a reason–
who wouldn’t long for walls that proved survival? Though
one could argue that every moment is pre-war (some war)
each day a pre-apocalypse. Pre-extinction infinite,
150 species tomorrow, and the next day, in Perpetua.
Looking back, in the fourth grade we memorized the Preamble,
me and the other 9-year olds ferally mistaking unity for
patriotism. Glossy-eyed, unaware yet of how atrocity
started and followed that old blue hope. Of how pain
cycles; the push-pull of past and future.
So now, I prepare carefully: how to not combust
under the pressure of both timelines pressing in,
squished like a beetle between heel and plank.
How not to be like lungs rupturing in space,
exploding with the very thing that sustains them.
I keep noticing these thresholds of aberration, entropy lurking.
All these moments before the thing that already happened
happens, when we pretend it’s nothing.
Maureen Morris
Maureen Morris (she/her) is a poet from Milford, Connecticut. She is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University for poetry, and is a reader for their literary journal, Blackbird. She is forthcoming in Foglifter Journal.
