Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is c-ohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast, serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press, and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.





Andrea Blythe

Belatedly, The Refusal



The jackal leaned close and winked, my skin shrieking. We both maintained a convenient fiction. He knew I was an idea, subject of his thought — just an overload in the switchboard. I was the definition of a face, never actually the face. Can you throttle laughter? Can you go beyond hands or arms? The jackal had a bullet in his mental gun. He shot wide, exploded the sun. Can you get drawn under the cheap stench of day? I heard the moment as it fell — time like velvety graywater or purple tonic. I wouldn’t be the assassin, the woman waved aside. I began without him. Fear wildly close as soon as I was gone. No one to understand the mysterious account of me but me.


Source: King, Stephen, The Plant, Philtrum Press, p. 52 "Belatedly, The Refusal" is part of a series that began as part of The Poeming, a challenge launched in 2017 in which over 50 poets were assigned one of Stephen King’s books and tasked with writing 31 found poems pulled from its pages. I was assigned The Plant, which I’ve continued working with since then. My process involves printing out the page and then skimming it, using a colored pen to underline, connect, circle, and scratch out words. The page looks more and more chaotic as I work, incomprehensible to anyone else — and sometimes not even myself. The full shape of the poem emerges when I translate it from the scribbled over page into a document, still fragmented and full of holes. I love the surprise of that moment, followed by the hunt for words needed to fill in the gaps. I love how found poetry allows me to explore a text and see what alternative stories it can tell.



Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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