Megan Falley is the author of two full length collections of poetry, After the Witch Hunt (2012) and Redhead and the Slaughter King (2014), both published by Write Bloody Press. She has performed her work on the popular television show “Verses and Flow”. She has represented NYC on three national poetry slam teams, and has poems published in several literary journals. In 2012 she toured the country for 100 days reading her poems everywhere. She is the creator of the online poetry course, Poems That Don’t Suck.
Her poem, "The Third Ceremony," appeared in Issue Sixty of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about an inevitable funeral, form as a continuance of content, and the possibilities that follow the stretching of the mind beyond the limits of language.
Even though the narrator becomes reliable because the voice feels honest, the poem does not stand as a solely single-voice poem. The person who the narrator is directly addressing is molded through the images, and the reader is left with various ways to construct or imagine this person. For you, who are these two characters? What about the sentiments derived from the images can you relate to, if at all?
This poem is a part of a series of poems in which I imagine my own brother’s funeral. Growing up with an addict, his funeral always felt inevitable, and I would often imagine it—what I would do, what I would say. Throughout my adolescence I would craft potential eulogies for him in the shower, on long drives—everything always felt so around-the-corner. The two characters are my brother and I, though he exists sort of like a dream in these poems, both very real and also only of my own imagination. I can relate to all the images—the cigarette line specifically—how his loss would permeate and ruin even the most beautiful things, the scent of flowers. How every bad thing would feel like his fault—even rain.
This poem alternates between one- and two-line stanzas, and in this way, the one-line stanzas stand out in space. What guided your decisions in structuring this work?
Often when I write poems that center around two people, I tend to write in couplets. I think I probably started out writing this poem in that form, but it felt wrong. The presence of my brother in this poem is mostly defined by his absence. As much as he was there in the poem, I also felt/feel blindingly alone in that place. The speaker in the poem (a dystopian me) is, like you said, sort of “standing out in space.” I wanted how the poem looked on the page to mirror that lonesomeness and loss.
The juxtapositions embedded in the lines are surprising and captivating. From “flowers” and “cigarettes” in the second stanza, to “fireflies” and “cruelest hands” in the fourth, each first image presented to the reader is immediately taken back and changed in the most unsettling but beautiful of ways. These shifts, though, feel natural and real. What advice would you give an aspiring writer who aims to capture such dimensional moments?
Thank you! There’s a lot of complexity of emotion in this piece—there’s obviously sadness and grief, but there’s also anger and relief, even irony, and I wanted the images in the piece to be as complicated as the feelings. I’d tell an aspiring writer to make lists of all the words and feelings and images they associate with what they’re writing about, and to go beyond simple. If they’re writing about nostalgia, maybe they’d start out with that included ‘photograph’, ‘shoebox’, ‘sepia’, and ‘memory’, but then I’d tell them to push for less tangible images and words of nostalgia—maybe ‘ferris wheel’, ‘arcade’, ‘bonfire’, ‘record player’, ‘july’, etc. I’d have them create interesting combinations with this new word bank. So, if the poem was about missing a person, or an era spent with someone long gone, maybe they’d say, “the record of your laugh set on repeat” or “the july that only exists in sepia now.” I’d tell an aspiring writer to be weirder, to play, to have fun and stretch their brain out of the limits of every day language — both our own and the one allotted to us by conventional society.
What are you currently reading?
For a novel, Haruki Murakami. Poets that really excite me right now are April Ranger, Sasha Warner-Berry, and Danez Smith.
What are you currently writing?
A poem a day for every day of 2014. Well into the 200s by now. I am also working on a manuscript to be published with Tired Hearts Press about Lana Del Rey. It’s called “Bad Girls, Honey” and it’s the most fun I’ve had while writing ever. Everything is in bloom.