ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Heather Derr-Smith is a poet with four books, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and Thrust winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award (Persea Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in Fence, Prairie Schooner and Missouri Review. She is founder and director of Cuvaj Se, a nonprofit supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and divides her time mostly between Iowa and Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
The Chase
Three Wolves, December Storm, Boundary Waters
Joan
When the girl dies in martyr stories her cut head goes on singing or testifies
silence is all we get from the dead in this century or a ghost
on the screen animated by hand in technicolor segmentation
geodesic distance Joan the Woman red and yellow of flames
heightening the dramatic effect
On the front lines over rapeseed and sunflowers
soldiers sing Wiseblood sing between two languages
between story and a song, history in the making splicing moment
to moment your eyes keep looking past his
eyes keep looking past what you are looking at
Here we are still bound in this world’s sob and heave
and it’s hard to know what century it is even finally dawns on us
it doesn’t even matter in the least How beautiful you were girl
hair shimmering like fish scales beside the Black Sea
where we camped in summer your brother cried when he caught a trout blood
dripping from its sucking mouth and now where has your brother gone?
Waves crashed into the sand and disappeared but kept reappearing
and the crawfish hid in their burrows
for a long time the moment felt like a door on the hinge of the world
and without it the water would pour up into the sky Genesis undone
the final deluge just like all God’s broken promises
It was you who threw the fish back into the waters and said no
I am not afraid of the world’s end
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
