ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Duy Quang Mai is an international student in Sydney, Australia originally from Hanoi, Vietnam. He is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. His poems have been published or are forthcoming from The Lifted Brow, Overland, Cordite and elsewhere. His work has been recognized by Foyle Young Poets and the John Marsden & Hachette Australia Prize. He is the author of the chapbook Homeward (Story Factory, 2018).
Ophelia
— after John Everett Millias
Winter had already dried to rust.
And I searched for you through
the frost-hung window above
my bathtub. The supermarket trolley
was still there. From last night it sat
like a cuffed calf. It was so still then
I thought I was made of sounds.
So I kept staring, while the sky unfurled
to footnotes. Outside, on a bicycle,
a couple laughed along the street.
The woman’s teeth flickered once
then twice, like flamed matchsticks.
Her cheeks, I imagined,
laced within her lover’s thumping
of chest. Back here, inside this
blueing hour, I waited and the faucet
still dripped, floating in the makeshift
river. Of course you were here
all the time. Even in echoes you
were still here. Weren’t you? The steam
blurred all my forests. Then my eyes,
my mouth. They unlatched by the face of
Ophelia. I came home, writer, by drowning.
Didn’t you see? I came home, holding
a bouquet of lilies. How I didn’t know
anymore. How the flowers withered brown
while the midnight clock was hammering
the air. Then, I heard something. Something,
like the falling of language.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
