ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of literary journal The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2019). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, New South, Passages North, and elsewhere. In 2018, she received a Pushcart special mention for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge
after Marty McConnell
Tell your body grow
smaller so it folds
into tinier spaces.
You could be an airplane
’s cargo hold. Sitting
on his starched couch,
you could be a ventriloquist
of limbs. Tangle yourself
over yourself. & only
revolt when they look
away — such proximity
is sticky. Sickly. Wear flesh
like a gown of other people
’s lizard prayers.
How many yesterdays does it take
to stretch a mouth.
How many beginnings until achieving
emptiness. Those hunters
you let into your body. Parasites
in gentle boys’ clothes. Maybe
you can finally put them
to use. If your heart
fucks like a beggar, let it.
Gut her in the street. Stupid girls
are always trying.
Didn’t anyone tell you
forgiveness is your blood?
When I wrote this poem I was sitting in my car next to a river in a town I used to live in. Processing a flood of memories and feelings of displacement, I scrolled through Twitter and came across the poem “Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell” (a line from which is the origin of this poem’s title). This poem adapted that line and became about the ways we embody our emotions, how physicality can be a costume that either obscures or betrays our desires. Above all, though, it’s a meditation on the tension and frustration between hardening yourself to others and letting them in, the way people can slip inside you in ways that are visceral and difficult to escape.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
