ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Mag Gabbert holds a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University and an MFA from The University of California at Riverside. Her essays and poems have been published in 32 Poems, Thrush, The Rumpus, The Boiler Journal, Anomaly, Phoebe, Birmingham Poetry Review, and many other journals. Mag teaches creative writing for the Graduate Department of Liberal Studies at Southern Methodist University and for Writing Workshops Dallas; she serves as an associate editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
Bleach
every time you come over
I spray the toilet bowl
like the opposite
of smoke it singes
my throat the room
feels combustible
the way you hold
my head in both hands
as you kiss me as if
you could drop it
like a shell against
the sand
or like a paper
covered firework a lit
cigarette cherry
bursting pink
to blossomed pits
against your skin
between your lips
as if you never realized
bleach would leave
this blemish on my sheet
or that your handprint
would strike me
through steam every
morning like the haloed
vacancies
of our bodies
once we’d risen
from the blankets
glowed like snow angels
which are the opposite
of angels
“Bleach” has been through more revisions than perhaps any other poem of mine, incidentally. The final version you see here is saved as draft #49 (and, for reference, a more typical poem would go through something like 15-25 saved versions). As it happens, the night before I received word that Glass would publish this piece, I’d shown three of its drafts to my intermediate poetry students — mainly to affirm that I make the same mistakes they do — and at one point one of them asked me, what made the poem worth sticking with? Ultimately, I decided it was the fact that I’d discovered what the piece wanted to convey; I knew that it should play with the idea of negatives, and that it should highlight forms of assertion via erasure, and the challenge was just figuring out how to effectively do that. The poems I give up on usually never quite figure out what they’re really about. But once I have the answer to that question, I feel a sense of obligation to see it through. That discovery is what binds me to a poem.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
