Gabrielle Spear is a poet, community organizer, and museum educator based in Queens and raised in Northwest Arkansas. She was named a Goucher College 2015 Kratz Summer Writing Fellow, a finalist in LUMINA’s 2017 Borders and Boundaries Nonfiction Contest judged by Leslie Jamison, and a 2017 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, fields magazine, Sukoon, The Hunger, Jet Fuel Review, and other publications.


Also by Gabrielle Spear: Imiryango Prison Transfer Mango Mornings


Gabrielle Spear

venerability1 study




after solmaz sharif i memorize the kinyarwandan phrase for my name is not white person tutsi dictator mistaken for christ enshrined in every household grenade attack in kicukiro unspoken of and therefore did not happen mama hand-washing my dirty underwear by lamplight a hutu man telling his reconciliation story to american tourists machete-carved forearms begging for change at kimironko market crows tap dancing on a bullet-stained church roof polish nuns teaching the blind children of kibeho about faith nose structure once measured for ethnicity mummified absent


1 in a rwandan accent, the english word for “vulnerable” sounds like “venerable.” When I returned from my semester abroad in Rwanda, still in shock from all I had witnessed, I found comfort in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, where she considers the politics of grief and vulnerability. Who do we grieve and why? What are the ways our mourning holds prejudice? Isn’t vulnerability an act of venerability as well? What are the ways venerable gestures of state power actually indicate a government is built on fear of their own vulnerability? I wanted to play with these ideas and Solmaz Sharif’s poem “vulnerability study” offered me the perfect way to do so.



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