ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Carolee Bennett lives in Upstate New York, where — after a local, annual poetry competition — she has fun saying she has been the "almost" poet laureate of Smitty's Tavern. She manages the Twitter account for the Tupelo 30/30 writing project and writes reviews for The American Poetry Journal.
Prettier When You Smile
When they say, Demonstrate mastery,
they mean, Use the word in a sentence. You must learn
to tie knots or the boat slips away like the man
at the end of the bar who answers, What
are you having today? with Planet Earth
is blue and there’s nothing I can do. And you
remember the Cape Canaveral family vacation
and lunch with an astronaut, how a child there asked,
Is it lonely in space? He’d traveled
17,000 miles per hour, which he explained as
five miles for every heartbeat.
And what we wanted to know was
Would you miss me?
The ones we love depart.
We squeeze in and out of anguish
like bees, no opening too small. The hive begins
with single cell. Our vocabulary for this
kind of busy work is limited: disease,
disease, disease.
Smile,
a man two stools down tells you, and you don’t
know what to say, cannot match words
with their proper definitions:
avow, perplex, twinge, encumber,
forebode. You spit bees at the worksheet
and sink down into the water like a ship
that once moved fast away but is no longer
waiting to be retrieved.
I am one of those people who sit at a bar with a notebook. Bar chatter is among my favorite forms of conversation. It zooms from topic to topic through connections you could never recreate. It also contains a strange mix of shorthand and deeply personal stories. I started this poem when sitting at a bar during one such exchange. It's a combination of the exchange, playful language and two topics that are my obsessions: disease (death) and intimacy.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
