[Of course I’m ashamed]

Of course I’m ashamed

to be made of what made me,

to perpetuate it.

I confused this word

with perpetrate for

a long time,

a distinction I still cannot really

understand.

When the bomb hit,

the little girl rose

like a dragonfly,

struck the ceiling with everything

she was made of,

and fell with the roof

back to land.

Her eyes pummeled purple, distended

around her skull

like dragonfly eyes.

Of course I’m ashamed

to be made

of bomb,

roof,

wing.

Robin Myers is based in Mexico City, where she works as a translator. Her poems have appeared in The Offing, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, ELKE: A Little Journal, Cabaret Wittgenstein, and New Millennium Writings (as the first-place winner of their 41st contest); her translations have been published in Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing Literary Journal, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. The poem published here is part of an unpublished manuscript, written in the voice of an aging unnamed persona in an unnamed place.