ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Author photo by Nicholl Paratore
Diana Clark is an elephant enthusiast and an MFA fiction graduate of UNCW, with special love for LGBTQIA+ literature and magical realism. Their work can be found in Lunch Ticket, Longleaf Review, Rust + Moth, Peach Mag, ENTROPY, and more. A 2015 alumni of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki & Thasos, and the recipient of the LGBTQ+ Writer Scholarship to The Muse & The Marketplace 2019, you can find them reading about pirates in Wilmington, North Carolina with their cat, Emily D.
Girls’ Night
I can’t tell you
what kind of wine I ordered,
just that it was
red, how the women laughed
and said, Red? Really? I could
never, not in this heat,
and how I had already managed
to fuck something up, to not
get it right. Their tall,
thin flutes of prosecco,
their sparkling
white. I can’t tell you
what was on the menu,
just that I couldn’t
afford it. I think there was fruit
wrapped in prosciutto. I think
there were tapas. I know that
the woman I was
close to slid a plate of
olives toward my hand,
God bless her, because she knew
I was trying, that I was
black-beans-out-of-the-can-for-
seven-dinners-in-a-row-kind-of-
hungry. The anxiety of purchasing
what stained the bottom
of my upper lip
that ugly purple color,
but how could I get through
that night without it?
I went to all of them, I really did.
I wanted
to get it right.
I wanted
to be as pink as
my labia, swollen with
feminine pleasure and
belonging.
I wanted
to learn, know how
to glisten, but then
the woman across from me
raised her glass, swirled and
swirled until whatever
oxygen left in my lungs
dissipated, gathered
in her next sip, the one she
took after proclaiming,
Can you imagine
being a guy? I think
I would kill myself.
Beneath my dress,
my penis uncurled,
sludge of a snail coiled out
of its shell, pushed
past the folds of
my other sex, and hit
the space between
my thighs, a soft
thunk on the seat
of my chair, and
I wanted,
I wanted,
I wanted
to die.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
