ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Emily Paige Wilson's debut chapbook I'll Build Us a Home is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her work can be found in The Adroit Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, PANK, and Thrush, among others. She lives in Wilmington, NC, where she received her MFA from UNCW, and works as an English adjunct.
Etymology of a Body
Skin: animal
pelt, wet muscle prone
to bruise and welt.
Face: Vulgar
Latin. Related to
"to make." Related to
form, figure,
your father
whose red
hair is recessive.
Eye: false cognate.
Expose: set forth.
Expulse: drive out.
How our sickness
does both
with the slick skin
of our pain. Mind:
memory.
Naked: to mimic
the mountain
as it falls. To feel
full in the failure.
Thirst: probably influenced
by a verb. Thigh:
high rise of the buttock.
Phallus: boring except
for its sounds, false
blend, hiss
at the end. I won’t even
begin with vagina:
how easy it is
to see a woman
did not create
that word.
Tongue: organ
of speech. Eyelash:
what branches
the deer left
when they licked
the blueblack berries
clean. Bone: Old
Saxon. Old cornerstone
burned in the cold. I came
to the market of your
lungs only to find it
plunged under the snow.
Name: protection
spell to be traded,
not sold. Skin: animal.
Chin: nasty gymnastic
of gossip. Murder:
unlawful killing,
secret killing.
Wrist: But what good
secrets have you heard
that aren't unlawful?
There's a large etymological dictionary in our kitchen that I browse through for inspiration. I've always been enthralled by the origin of words: how is it we've come to translate, or attempt to translate, everything — colors, thoughts, fears — into sound? In writing this piece, I wanted to play with the idea that I could find an origin for the sounds we've adhered to our bodies. Some of the origins are real; some are not. My boyfriend, the poem's first reader, had assumed they all were real and questioned whether or not the title led readers to this same false assumptions. Isn't all language, though, deceitful in how it pretends to be precise? The etymology of "chin" here, believe it or not, is roughly true.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
