ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past (Finishing Line). Her recent work appears online at Terrain.org and Waccamaw. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs.
Also by Angie Macri:
Underwater Panther
Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past
Revelations of the Temporal
Graeae, What We Share
We wander, sisters,
across the majority of the earth.
In the foam, we share one eye
as good women,
one vision with depth
of all zones,
through marine snow,
past the abyss.
Born with one eye, with hands
that know how to lock
and pass without seeing, with skin
that knows sight
and voices that don't
need anything but one
tooth, again shared,
a bone bared,
we roam, graeae
in lunar rhythms.
What does gravity know
of the bodies of swans
or the arms of old women
who have borne all: hope,
fear, love, the wrap around
oneself when alone,
the rocking to say
you are not alone.
We remember our mother's pace
as we bloomed in her womb,
she of sharks
and whales, she
who knew rocks
and war. Wrapped
in saffron, terrible,
sometimes destroyer,
she wore the sun's
gold stigma, stalk, and style dried
and ground to richness, love
as pleasure in crocus
dust. Sisters, she
showed us the way.
My father's family comes from the area in southern Italy known as Magna Graecia. A first-generation American, he left all that behind. I was raised in the heartland, the American world of my mother's family. But this was an area known as Little Egypt. The Greco-Roman world was never far. This poem was written years ago, before I had my second daughter, before the misogyny in our country was laid bare. The power of the feminine seems even more vital to explore now.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
