Megan Howard: 'Jupiter' from 'In the Dark'
'Maybe, after all these years, I was right:
You are the eye of the storm—boat-tossing,
Home-wrecking, land-tearing—you know the kind.
You don’t love, you lust; you use and ruin.
You have a core of ice and rock, vicious
And vindictive. When did you ever care?
Yes, this is a list of accusations,
But its also the tears of three a.m.,
The days spent recovering, the healing.
And yes, I am still standing, so fear me
Because to match your ice cold, I have fire
And not even you could extinguish that.'
From 'Not Yet' in the Firebird Press anthology Resurgence:.
'Today I watch you as you take the long
route home, steal through the cornfield and out on
to the open road—a mess of tousled
honey blond hair and sunburnt cheeks, tired
feet in white pumps half a size too small. You
are still coltish—all knock-kneed and gap-toothed,
skin unopened save the graze on your left
knee. A girl not yet ruined.'
Megan, after taking A-level Creative Writing alongside her GCSEs—and with great success—has developed a newfound confidence in her writing, progressing from publishing poetry and short stories in the school magazine to writing and presenting reports for BBC radio Norfolk whilst still in Sixth Form.
Following an abrupt end to her second year there owing to the global pandemic, she decided to return to her fiction-writing roots and joined the Firebird Writer’s Group, with the intention of honing her skills and devoting time to an art form that could serve both as personal catharsis and as a platform with not only the potential of enriching and comforting the lives of others, but also the possibility of disrupting the status quo.
As an author she believes she ha a moral obligation to write something honest—hold the mirror up to the beautiful, yet often grisly, reality of life, and to tell the stories of those silenced or otherwise simply not represented either in contemporary literature or wider society.