ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Christina Yoseph is an emerging writer whose essays and poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Entropy, Pithead Chapel, The Rumpus, and more. She lives in California with her illustrator-musician girlfriend.
The Child Inside
depending on whom you ask
in my father’s language
my middle name means
the land between
two rivers
but
i don’t know
my father’s language
scarcely
understood it when
he spoke it
to me
when i hear the name i
imagine a point on a map
but not a home
a likeness that
i can’t
quite place but
not a
reflection
when i
hear it i picture
in my head movies
about a tiny planet that
though spontaneously birthed
from the sun is not capable
of withstanding
its radiation
eventually the planet is edged
out of the sun’s orbit until
it is so far adrift in the galaxy that
no astronomer ever learns
it exists
i envision movies that
take place in meadows like
the one described by stephen king
in the girl who loved tom gordon
like in the scene where the
girl who loves tom gordon
standing in a meadow
faces off against her monster and
her monster is
the stuff of nightmares
anthropomorphized and
animated by
maggots
except in this story there is
no man and
there is no nightmare at
least not in
the classic sense at
least not like
the ones in the stories
told by stephen king and
in these movies the lone
girl in the meadow is a
fawn knobby-kneed and
grazing and
in this story there is
no confrontation and
there is no monster instead
there are just eyes
watching
from somewhere
beyond the clearing.
As a kid, one of the few things my dad and I did together for fun was take regular trips to Barnes & Noble. On one visit, when I was just barely twelve, I picked up Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Over fifteen years later, the imagery of one particular dream reminded me of some of the visual motifs King employed in his novel. I thought it was interesting that the visual parallels between King’s story and my dream were so strong: while familial separation and isolation anchor his story and I’d been coping with the recent estrangement from my own family, I hadn’t read King’s novel since my adolescence. In this poem, I write about how the stress we experience during childhood and adolescence is completely capable of following us into adulthood. In that way, it can act as a specter, giving us the feeling of being watched until we reckon with it, if we ever do.
Poetry is a really great vehicle for conveying the disturbing imagery that appears in these dreams, most of all because it is one that provides serious catharsis.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
