ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Ross White is the author of two chapbooks, How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press, 2014) and The Polite Society (Unicorn Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. His manuscript in progress, Guilt Ledger, was selected by Edward Hirsch to receive the 2016 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend from Warren Wilson College. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Securities
I will live a life full of the safe option.
Anti-lock brakes, smoke detectors, vaccines,
reasonable speeds on residential streets.
And that I've chosen to love you, is too
a commodity. Not, as in copper or coffee,
a good to be bartered, but these years with you
have been a trade-off. Each of us surrenders
something of value: my street hockey league,
perhaps my last chance to break a bone,
or your sewing room, or your plans
to live on every continent. I thought once
I was immortal. What teenager won't tell you
live forever with every action? Security
was a thing wired into the place by technicians,
systematized and safe. I never reckoned
with risk. I never reckoned with futures.
It was all options and swaps. I knew
what a little time and charisma could get me.
I knew how to slink into the next opportunity,
like switching the stereo from Hendrix to Nirvana.
I lived on shuffle then, the perfect metaphor
for risky without risk, a series of random selections
from a carefully curated set of songs.
The security of the known. Then, you —
great unknowable you. Our first week together
you peeled the sunburnt skin from my back
with such delight. You wobbled to the beach
on a ten-dollar bicycle with bent handlebars.
You taught me only enough Chinese to say
Wo hen gāoxìng. I could practically
feel the tightening waistband of middle age
when before I'd secretly hoped to wrap
my car around a telephone pole. Now
that I can see the imprint of its elastic,
I'm fitting for the walker, the wheelchair.
Marriage is a kind of derivative: calculated bet
on what is to become. Pure speculation.
In bars sometimes I assign value
to what I gave up. We are outperforming
the market, and against convention-
al wisdom, I plan to hold this position.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
