ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Rita Mookerjee is an assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the winner of the 2023 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award and the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press). Her poems can be found in CALYX, Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, New Orleans Review, and the Offing.
Dispatches from the Surveillance Era
one day everyone buys a little cylinder
inside lives a faceless woman every
cylinder holds a woman & all of them
share the same name
one summer everyone plays a game of nostalgia
through parks & city blocks
catching tiny fairies & glowing ghosts until
we discover we are an infantry unit making
maps for civil war rumor has it that
somewhere beneath a pizza shop rich people
grind little girls into dust & sell the dust to
richer men this rumor is untrue but the dust
is real many rich men keep the dust girls in
the sea far from home coating them with
oil to keep them supple some escape
grassy island tombs others are still inside
There have been so many violations of privacy and personhood in recent years. It is deeply unsettling to see how conspiracy theories sometimes have a grain of truth. It is also unsettling that there has been no justice for the women and girls harmed by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. Though they generate a lot of despair, I seek to bear witness to these atrocious events with poems like this.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
