ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Sabine Holzman is a poet from Southern California. Her work has appeared in Gigantic Sequins, The Poetry Society, and Alexandria Quarterly, among other places. She is probably thinking about Iceland, or the enchanted woods of folklore and myth.
Also by Sabine Holzman:
Anna Akhmatova's Return to Leningrad
Elegy for My Ghost Mother
Massachusetts
midsummer
where you sung a song & hymned my throat into a forest
my body not a body but a lyre
where I hero that I wanted to be became an Orfeo
and you ghost-girl in the reeds sleeping beneath the orchard became a Heurodis
where we marred our skin climbing trees blood on bark where the wood ached with us
where we sucked honeysuckle until our lips were numb & our kisses heady as fairy-wine
where you turned & pointed your face flush skyward midsummer in your eyes
where we bathed in a greendark lake chased catfish in the shallows and dreamt
of men, tall & bright in the sunlight who would take us away to enchanted groves
where trellises of violets spilled down our nakedness & we named our girlhoods wounds
where we made beech forests with our eyes
where my mother brought me to a river and bade me, drink.
I wrote "Massachusetts" in the summer of 2017 — where, as the title suggests, I spent in rural Massachusetts. Here's the thing with Massachusetts summers: they're heady as holy wine. The heat simmers in the air, almost as if the Otherworld from myth is humming around you. That was also the same summer I read Sir Orfeo. When writing this poem, I wanted to capture the aura of the uncanny woods, like the author does in Sir Orfeo: to capture the headiness, the weight, the slowing of time in the forest where Orfeo first saw the fairy host. Of course, I wasn't kidnapped by fairies that summer — but the wilderness of Massachusetts felt like a place where I could be.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
