ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Erin Lyndal Martin is a poet, music journalist, fiction writer, essayist, and visual artist. Her poems have appeared widely in online and print journals such as Prelude, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Yalobusha Review, and Gigantic Sequins.
Pickering Wharf
Like stepping on a glacier in pinstripe pants because you want to be alone. A catcall comes from the silence and you are flushed with happy for conversation suddenly. Or this: like stepping on a glacier totally naked because you live in a colony of ghosts now and what's a body to a ghost but a souvenir? You never believed in ghosts before, not until someone wrote the story of a haunting on your palm. Thick black permanent marker. After days, only some of the letters had faded. Or this: like stepping on a glacier and finding there is no glacier beneath you. Or this: like stepping out onto a glacier and stabbing yourself in the gut.
That winter I was always driving up to Salem, MA to escape my grief or just have it validated or both. I always ended up walking past the harbor at Pickering Wharf, and I could see the big pieces of ice in the water, the sea steam rising as water met air. Every time I saw how perfectly the half-frozen, empty harbor echoed my own life, I felt a little sick.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
