ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Clair Dunlap grew up just outside Seattle, Washington, and started writing poems at the age of six. She is the author of In the Plum Dark Belly (Beard Poetry, 2016) and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in L’Éphémère Review, Hobart, Peach Mag, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Occulum, Noble / Gas Qtrly and more. She currently lives in the Midwest and answers research questions in an academic library.
Also by Clair Dunlap:
The Beyond (1972)
Three Poems
In case you’ve never seen a sand dollar that’s still alive
Abstraction Blue (1927)
after Georgia O’Keeffe
i have done nothing all summer but wait for myself
to be myself again —
squatted among the lupines stuffing my skirt with long flowers,
milked my toes in the rainwater running to the gutters, the same color
as the creek we’d wade in twenty years ago,
stopped to photograph anything blue, to fit each one under my tongue
just to keep,
not to swallow.
bent outside the concert, watching the ocean spray of once-windshield
lap in the sun.
folded on the museum steps, glazing my eyes over until the city
is a mountain behind the park.
at night in the heat i imagine my body as dark ocean until i fall asleep.
i dream just the color green, but it’s one i
can’t find here.
that’s how i know i'm dreaming, not finding myself out in the night gardens
cutting the flowers again
arranging them in the street into some message
to myself come morning
that anything plucked must be tended,
or it will always die.
*First line from a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Russell Vernon Hunter
"Abstraction Blue (1927)" is part of a series of poems after Georgia O’Keeffe — some start with quotes from her letters or interviews with her, like this one, and others begin just with a painting. O’Keeffe had very strong ideas about place and home and a bright independent streak. Having lived for seven years halfway across the country from where I grew up on the West Coast, where I thought I’d be back to long before now, I think a lot about what home is, what a place means and how it and we accomplish that meaning in tandem, and also about what it means to be far from family. Sometimes it is suffocating to be away from somewhere you still call home, despite barely recognizing parts of it and sometimes you can still find its best parts far, far from their impetus — ever so slightly changed, but enough. For now.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
