Elegy for the Last Time I Saw Your Hangnails by Maren Logan

Go ahead, call me crazy. Call me cowpunk.

Elegy for the Last Time I Saw Your Hangnails

by Maren Logan

I said a living girl is a dead girl. I said my guardian

angel is racking up debts that I can’t pay. Winter is a 
debt collector. A living girl is a bled girl is a girl milked 

of her innocence. Hey you, I’m looking for directions

to a place where I won’t get homesick. Where the ground 
doesn’t smell like a lottery ticket. Where the sky’s gradient 

doesn’t shimmer like a blue raspberry gas station slushie. 

The last time I asked that, we ran off west through Nebraska.
Then we changed our minds and drove down to Texas. Wind 

turbines gaged the earth like a punk’s septum. The flatter 

the earth, the bigger the sky. The bigger the sky, the louder 
the wailing. I’m gonna live there one day. Go ahead, call me 

crazy. Call me cowpunk. It’s true: We don’t get to choose

where we’re from, but we get to choose who we relate to. When 
the doctors told me my eating disorder was killing me, I said 

instead, I was dying of desire. I still desire a wet ring of my 

strawberry lip gloss around your mouth and the curls pulled 
out of your hair by a cotton pillowcase. I still desire testimony 

carved into screen doors. I clung to you like the spit-soaked white

bread from my grandpa’s fried peanut-butter banana sandwiches 
clung to the roof of my mouth, like “I’ll Never Let You Go 

(Little Darlin’)” clung to its chords. Give me one more time to 

prove I’m okay with not doing it right. Give me one more time to 
prove I can not be good and still be yours. I rehearse requiems

in the knotted knolls of the night. The moon chaps my mouth.

The theme of December’s Poem of the Month category was “Elegy”. We’ll open on January 1st for next month’s round. You may submit to this category for free. We pay $33 for selected pieces. More details here.

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Contributor’s Note

Every so often, I get a strange, overwhelming desire to move to Texas and start over. I haven’t exactly figured out why it’s always Texas, other than the first time I drove through, I was listening to “The Big Sky” by Kate Bush and feeling the world open like an eye above me. Then I got my first speeding ticket. I wanted to write a poem where the speaker was naturally a perfectionist but always messing up. A speaker who was not wise or kind but wanted to be both. A speaker who was controlled by desire and shame in tandem.

I’m thinking about Texas a lot now that there’s winter storm advisory where I live in Indiana, and every part of me feels chapped and bitter. I think it’s an elegy not just for love but also chapped lips, an elegy food stuck in your partner’s teeth or a joke that doesn’t land, an elegy for the most embarrassing moments of your life.

I wanted a speaker who, like me, keeps going back to Traci Brimhall’s “Jubilee,”: “I am harrowed, hallowed. I am stone, stone, / I have not trembled. Love nails me to the world” and wishing they had a hammer.

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Editor’s Note

We received over 700 poems about loss, grief, & death this month. We were taken by Maren Logan’s “Elegy for the Last Time I Saw Your Hangnails” for how deeply it understands elegy as something sticky, bodily, and unfinished (as opposed to a clean act of mourning).

I love how Logan lets desire do the driving here. “Instead, I was dying of desire.” The speaker wants recklessly (a ring of strawberry lip gloss, curls pulled loose by a cotton pillowcase, the taste of childhood clinging to the roof of the mouth) and refuses to tidy that wanting.

The landscapes shift with the speaker’s inner climate: Indiana winter, Nebraska flatness, Texas sky opening “like an eye above me.” Geography becomes grief’s accomplice. What I find most charming is the magnificent, self-assured, voice of the speaker. And finally: “Give me one more time to / prove I can not be good and still be yours.” — that plea cracks the poem open. This is elegy as rehearsal — rehearsing loss, rehearsing apology, rehearsing a version of the self that might survive desire without erasing it.

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