ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Jennifer Whalen’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Cimarron Review, & elsewhere. She was the 2015-2016 L.D. & LaVerne Harrell Clark House writer-in-residence at Texas State University. She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield.
The Heart That Loves Is Always Wrong
I want to see the world: pure setting without context.
Flower buds not in the image of Spring,
but blooms in & of
themselves.
As if waking having never slept;
as if sleeping with no hope of dreaming.
I want to be singular as if spurred from nothing.
The wind is having its time with the maple leaves.
Pretty soon, it’ll be bare.
A gas station pump free
of all my ideas of gas station pumps.
I want to press its buttons like a crisp language.
Inside my heart is another heart, but smaller
& more aware of itself.
There isn’t a place in the state where I could meet you
as you are.
The wind is having its time with the window screen:
a looseness that won’t wobble out.
I want to turn to you as if breaking fresh from molding.
The one heart is just as wrong as the other.
They can’t seem to love a thing right.
I was inspired to write “The Heart That Loves Is Always Wrong” based off a small sign I received as a gift that read: “The heart that loves is always young.” The poem was also part of a prompt-based exercise, instructing the writer to write a poem that a reader would be immediately resistant to. By changing just a few letters in the original sentence, I could strike a much murkier perception of love and explore “rightness” and “wrongness” and their definitions of both morality and correctness, as well as the limits of both of those definitions.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
