ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor, forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in early 2019. Her work has appeared Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Seneca Review, and The Shallow Ends, among other journals. She’s co-editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and coordinator of the MFA program at UNCW. She lives in Wilmington, NC.
Some Say the World
for Annabelle, on her 18th Birthday 1. I started an uneasy tally years ago while you, still tiny, ate your first muffin, oven warm. From your fingers butter dripped down your dimpled arms, CNN silent behind you, towers collapsing
behind you, towers collapsing and collapsing. I kept the tally, too, while I rocked you in a cozy darkness lit by sudden, shocking bursts of fire and smoke rising from Kabul as it fell. What kind of world could I give you, give you to?
could I give you, give you to? For birth, Spanish speakers say dar luz, to give light. Now we hold candles in Lafayette Square Park, twelve thousand vigilant in the President’s backyard, and I weep so loudly strangers console me, offering their arms across the flickering dark.
their arms across the flic My mother feels things deeply, you explain to the tall woman in the pussy hat, the dapper man in plaid who told us bigots call a child born to undocumented parents on U.S. soil an anchor baby.
an anchor baby. Darling girl, this is not the hour in which I hoped this is not the hour in whic you’d come of age. 2. At four you kept a beetle — a lifeless Fiery Searcher — vivid green and copper carapace unmoving on a bed of cotton in a little box beneath my reading lamp, and day after day I let you believe that meager heat might resurrect it. How awful and how sweet to wake to your face, hopeful, at my nightstand. Am I a coward? It’s my job to be to you the bearer of good news and bad — nest of hatchlings, and bad — nest of sun-bleached bone — and I’ve tried to deserve it, spent hours, years, abiding as you dropped stick after stick into the brook from one side of a bridge, then crossed with you to wait for each one to come into view on the other side. Now what will come Now what will come into view, my daughter, I’m afraid to know, but you — I don’t have to tell you that beetle’s dead. You’re a citizen of this future. Your near-grown face is beautiful, is brave. You believe in science and revolt. You tell me some flowers won’t open won't open till they burn. 3. Today I watch video of an Iraq War vet shooting strangers in a Florida airport then spend the next hour trying to soothe myself with a clip that shows a man freeing a sparrow frozen to a metal fence post by holding the little body in his big hand and breathing on its feet until the ice melts. That November night when you returned home after sixteen hours feeding ballots into the box in an elementary school gym on a county road that winds between scrub pines and shacks, scrub pines and shacks, you knew, but I gripped your father’s hand before the TV and told you, No — It’s too soon to call! It's too soon to call! You went to bed. In the morning, I steadied myself to offer the comfort I thought you’d need from me. Instead you declared, from me. Instead you declared, This is what happens before the revolution. Onscreen the man breathes on those delicate feet again, the bird afraid until the moment he opens his gloved hand. I can’t tell whether I breathe or you do. Or I can, and it shames me. Or I can, Or I can, and it thrills me. Go ahead and fly, the man says. the man says. Go ahead and fly —
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Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
