ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Originally from Youngstown, Ohio, Rochelle Hurt is the author of two collections of poetry: In Which I Play the Runaway (2016), which won the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City (2014), which was selected for the Marie Alexander Series in prose poetry from White Pine Press. Her work has been included in the Best New Poets anthology series and she's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Phoebe, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Slippery Rock University. She also runs the review site The Bind.
Mimi
mirrored my idea of baby-me. Chatty doll double
of no self I could see, her pink bloomers and O-lips
smacked of Midwestern silence. At night my breath
cauled her plastic skull and fogged her stuck-open eye,
its blue glass a tiny rupture in the black room, glint
of nothing really, if not seen. At eleven, I was
pregnancy-crazed, so I shoved Mimi up my shirt
before I fell asleep. At twelve I left her splayed
in the corner as internet porn taught me the right way
to give a blowjob. The kneeling woman on screen
had brown hair like mine, but I couldn't see her face,
by which I mean: she couldn't look back at me.
I won't say this is why I kept quiet when a boy filled
his hands with my breasts in the school chapel one day.
But I will tell you he never once looked at my face
or saw the bright rupture of rage opening under my tongue.
When I spoke out of turn in class after that, the nuns asked:
who do you think you are? I thought of Mimi's voice box
bleating me me, worn echo of her original plea: kiss me —
dumb doll who could only name herself by breaking.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
