202030

“202030” is a personal process I started loosely sometime in 2022. On the cusp of my 30th year of life, while living through the harrowing start of the 2020’s, I began collecting the notes, poems, drawings, and photographs I had generated over the last decade or so as a young woman growing up during a new century. My intention was to distill a certain amount of cohesion from my experiences and creative output, most of which was generated compulsively as an emotional coping strategy. The vision for the final product is a body of work that could access the essence of that era of growth and confusion, while also carving out a great deal of clarity and agency for myself as a woman grown in the current moment.

So far, the result has been an evolving collection of poems and images that evoke, to the best of my ability, the psychedelic and immense experience of young womanhood in the 21st century.

- Megan Cunningham
04.07.2023

American Spring

The columbine will bloom soon,
as the daffodils are melting.
May's heatwave left us all
a little worn and baffled.

Summer arrived to the party a little drunk to begin with;
the American sun, baked.

The ante has been upped & the floods will come;
all the Thunderers that never left.

So let's spread more seeds;
columbine, clover, carrot,
all wild and free
across lawns,
and remnants of roads,
and me.

Catch a Wave

Catch a wave,
catch a wave,
what they're telling you
is catch a wave.

Paper, pulp content,
on the history book page.

Knights & kings & tyrants,
all took shits & came;
pissed down their leg as
welp or tippler,

yet along the way
they caught a wave.

So their demons, their shades,
bequeathed a mill of malignity,
power the wheel that grinds away
all of those,

Any of us,
who don't catch a wave.

Fluttering

Fluttering --
Endless fluttering.

Fidgeting and
negotiating too much potential kinetic energy
nestled in my breast.

Crunching in --
all the tiny muscles of my shoulders;
lifting up, pressing in --
Squeezing back into too much skin,
too dense of bone,
too heavy a chest.

I am too many moths in a jar with no air holes.
Life requires me to beat myself upon glass ceilings.
I will die trying.

Dad’s Advice

I don't always
agree with my
dad's advice but
"you can't live your
whole life at once"
is wise.

Alone

When left alone long enough,
alone becomes the preference.

Each noise, too loud.
Any question, too invasive.
The smallest request, an overstep.

When left alone long enough,
alone becomes its own trajectory.

Zeitgeist

Time spirit, trickster.

Omniscient curator of consciousness.
Whims swinging wildly,
capricious to catastrophic.

Taboo tabulator,
Touting proselytizers
From one untoppleable temple

To the next,
Leading an infinite troop of towers
In cascading loops of collapse.

Vexing inferni.

You are more noisy ghost
Orchestrating din than
Benevolent collective constellation.

Unliving deity of inconstancy, ephemera;
One can only know what you were,
Like any mortal thing.

Cast Iron

He casts iron.
Well-seasoned, hot and hard.
Cold but porous-
Balanced, cycled, process damaged.

He casts iron. He does.
Popping, and spitting.
He pulls it close; he’ll push it away.

He casts
hard glances, pitchforks, prodding words.
Your heating and cooling, my waxing and waning.
Quenching makes metals brittle
And our biology thrives in this furnace.

He casts iron.
Demons in the kitchen.
Frying chicken, drinking wine.

Burn me, it’s ok, burn me.
Your heat is searing and I smell
raw steak, beer, sweat, stink, tears.

Doing Right by a Rat

There was a rat in the compost heap
as I dumped another dawn's coffee grounds.

A rat in the compost heap,
browsing lazily, but I think I'll let her be.

The world is not ending,
but our way of life will,
most likely.

So I'll let the rat sleep

in our heap
of food
we let go bad
in the bottom of the fridge.

Mercy.