ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in New Jersey.
Also by Margaret Ray:
If a Lion Could Speak, We Couldn’t Understand Him
Tourist
The Problem of Where to Put Things
Say your uterus is killing you.
Say that phrase is literal,
or call it chronic, knife-point pain.
Say someone says hysterectomy,
and then you have to change
your plans, the size and shape
of your life, empty out the rooms
in your imagined future. The future
that once galloped freely, ranging
across all the hills of your mind,
now it limps and you have to pen it.
Remove the pain from one vital part of you
by subtraction. Say you have to make
such a decision, make preparations
in the mind, even if you have someone
to drive you home.
The organ, though, the empty,
hurting house — you have to
let them cut it out. And
the imagined children, the version
of your life that branched away,
some time ago, from where you now
survive, do you just cut that off? No, you do it
like you shoot a beloved, dying horse.
Whispering softly to it,
you lead it gently down
into the horse-sized hole you dug,
then fire.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
