Thank You Card for Loving a Woman with OCD by Megan Mary Moore

I think of that myth:

a dead man in a tree,

dressed in his scuba gear

—wetsuit, mask, fins— is

discovered in a clean up

of a California forest fire.

Picked up in a bambi bucket

by a helicopter gathering water,

he was dropped from

ocean, through skies, through flames.

 

It’s a story about fate

and what we give to save.

 

When I zoom out from our love,

I see rabbits and blue birds

drenched and shining in the sun,

and me somewhere on that forest floor,

barely breathing, buried in mud

cool and safe, all threat gone,

thanking you,

the scuba diver in the sky,

for your sacrifice.

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Megan Mary Moore is the author of Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and the forthcoming To Daughter a Devil (Unsolicited Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Grist, and Contemporary Verse 2. She lives in Cincinnati where she teaches dance, dresses like a fairy princess, and writes poems about what scares her.