Larisa Svirsky is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Voices, Smartish Pace, The Fem, Uppagus, and The Ocean State Review. Her chapbook, Mission, recently won the Sheila Ortiz Taylor Chapbook Competition and will be published by the OIA Arts Press.


Also by Larisa Svirsky: Mortal logic Epiglottis


Larisa Svirsky

Belonging



I've been making gratitude lists on doctor's orders but they don't tell me any more about what I'm grateful for One day it's sunflowers accidentally buying so many peaches I have to make pie my advisor's suggestion to stop beating my heart against the wall the wet grass on the lawn the wobble in my front porch the purple streaks of bird shit the memory of settling my stomach on the deck in California coloring a picture of a phoenix being, somehow, a phoenix having that story, which I like to tell about going to class on a medication that made me giggly and forgetful sitting through the last day of Existentialism blood dripping and clotting internally coagulation, coalescence, togetherness of some of my blood cells with some others But really what I want to tell you is that victory leaves something else behind and what happens to the ashes once the phoenix has risen? and isn't a phoenix a mythical creature? and don't I want a real life here on this planet? and I do, sometimes, but if I admit that I have to know it means leaving some pitiful part of me behind who never stood a chance but stands always in my shadow waiting until she's large enough to ride this ride but she will never grow and I don't know how to stop wanting to buckle her in and take her someplace safe


Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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