ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Emily Lake Hansen is the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books, forthcoming 2020) and the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in Atticus Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, 8 Poems, and BARNHOUSE among others. She serves as the poetry editor for Minerva Rising Press and spends most of her time playing children’s board games in Atlanta.
Also by Emily Lake Hansen:
Pharaoh’s Daughter Keeps a Diary
Desert Vacation
Brat in the Garden of Eden
My male professor asks haven’t women
been writing about this for decades already?
been writing about this for decades already?
It’s a crafted skill — I can undo myself
with a single fleeting thought.
I’ve got a potion good for rumination,
a shiny crystal in my pocket that pulls
compliments into secret chambers.
No one likes an insecure woman.
And why should they? I pick flower petals
and they all say he loves me not. I pick
fruit and it’s all rotten. I’m a spoil sport
when there’s fun. I rain on parades
when I’m invited. But this is all
whining
who wants to listen to such
dribble? I come from a lineage
of women broken by potbellies
and oversharing. My mother asked me
at eight if she looked fat in her dress.
My grandmother said the upside
of dying was that she finally got thin.
The first time a man really loved me,
I was shocked it wasn’t a joke: what do you call
a woman bound to failure by needlepoint
and crochet? A lady, of course.
You sit her in the corner, you talk her
down to her friends, you position some
reflective surface perfectly so she can see
there’s no escaping that pinch of doubt
planted as a chip in a computer, as a seed
inside dirt, as an egg burrowed in a uterine wall.
On my wildest days, I grow fibroids instead,
needy, incessant tumors that promise
they’re not cancer. At night, they whisper
this will only hurt a little —
just stay still. I close my eyes
and imagine an ether without bodies,
a body without dimples, a dimple
unsevered by dog teeth. From his jeep,
a man jerks off to me when he thinks
I’m not looking. But he didn’t touch you,
right? No, he didn’t touch me.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
