Bio
Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere.
Trigger Warning
Each day on the family calendar
was a humongous patch of white
my mom would fill with curly appointments
and playdates it took forever to plough through.
Christmas was never going to come.
Every second before spring break felt like Velcro.
Each day waiting for my birthday was eons.
And I was definitely going to die before I turned 25.
I had all the time in the world.
Until I look at my own calendar now.
It’s got to be that someone
is stealing impossible amounts of days.
All I have to do is blink, and pages have passed.
Who treats their calendar like a flipbook?
There isn’t even a good picture appearing
in the whir
of those grids
of time
as they fall onto each other ever faster—
they make no image as they fly past at all.
More and more of them in between
life’s landmarks with each passing year;
fewer and fewer anticipated events
to put the brakes on time.
I’m rounding the corner to my 40th birthday
faster than I comprehend to be possible,
contending hard to see myself as an adult
since I have none of the normal,
expected, or desired markings of adulthood,
only one very much unwanted one:
the constant feeling of running out of time.