prying open our ribcages, just to prove that the expatriate heart still beats

in the ruin bar in Budapest

we talked about all the places it had gone wrong—

in Nebraska and North Carolina, these disjointed

legacies veering down into front-lawn funerals

for the people that we were. I sat, sober as a sin,

under the purple disco balls and the plant canopies,

the permanent marker on broken plaster and the

smeared greenhouse roof. not for the first time

I felt the broken hinges in my chest falling open,

amidst the shattered mirrors strung up like

origami cranes, while the fishnet lights draped

and the red neon pinned me to the periphery. there

is nothing quite so pitiable as the expatriate, sitting

in our willful exile lamenting all that had sent us

scrambling away in the first place. that I had

never been beautiful, never been sufficient, that I

had gone down screaming into my own inevitable

rejection on a date that no one even bothered to mark

on their calendar anymore. we recount old chapels;

we recount places we cannot return to. we speak

of photos and bridges and timelines burned,

we speak with a flippant bitterness and a certain

self-obsession. in the converted archaeology of the

war-century, apocalypse rises salient as the light,

and all of us lost darlings rattle like rats to linger

in the carved-out ribcage where purple houseplants

and paper flowers somehow still grow despite hostile

conditions, while all the ghost-bodied inhabitants murmur

our each and every earthly secret, spilling spirits

and charting silences like stars. all this decay

is its own kind of brightness, as I turn violet

in the corners, all cheekbone and abandonment,

still chasing down belonging in any color

I can salvage.


Also by Megan Busbice

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