Solid Quarter

Visit Trembling Pillow Press for poetry books, broadsides, chapbooks, and Solid Quarter Magazine.

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Thursday, April 12, 2018

Dear Poetry, boated to grief

Dear Poetry,

Do you ever run out of words for a breaking, the way language falls short yet we squirm inside the telling, desperate, a can-you-pull-me-free from the container of loss plunging under.

Do you know how a sibling will slip so birthdays become times of both where did I meet you and some stranger takes your place, touching me.

Do you remember the weight of a child laid on your chest, the sweet scent of you emerged from the cocoon of a place I considered land mine, a terror, the horror show of riddled fate.

Do you know how seduced I was by longing that I swallowed my name, went long silent in the draught of learning to speak double edged, forked tongue, spells loosed the swept hysteria of she screaming whose voice I can't echo.

Do you recall whole cities disappear, the past washed under watercolor, all of it traced as heart shapes in the sand near the coming tide.

Do you know that I looked for love and couldn't see it around me, my shame I held before me blocking my view as if good enough even existed, as if the notion of deserving was no more than a fiction.

When I controlled the poem, I thought I was writing my truth. I was writing a death sentence because my cells coded that lust in the making, what I grew into as legacy, mud and dirt of country houses held up by secrets names.

For you to have kept me in your sight.

Lined to the castaway. Even now I think what life carved into by love, the fissures of sound knifing beneath even bone.


-M

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