ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Megan Alpert’s collection The Animal at Your Side won the Airlie Prize and is forthcoming in 2020. She was also the recipient of an Orlando Poetry Prize and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Storyscape, Sixth Finch, Harvard Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and many others. As a journalist, she has reported for The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and Smithsonian.
Poets Resist
Edited by Logan February
July 10, 2019
Edited by Logan February
July 10, 2019
After, Before
— November 2016-January 2017
A child reads a book and learns
the words
boxcar
barbed wire
Later
in a video sees the charred remains.
In her mind she practices the boxcar the fence:
to run be shot
or stay be raped and gassed To result
forever half
so even her daughters
in the safety of North America embed in a house
that grows to them like skin
*
But why guilt? Amira asked
the day we walked up Georgia Avenue
You weren’t even
there Listen she said:
After partition her great aunt walked
to Pakistan holding a sack of keys
that each matched a door
in the house she’d never return to —
they’d pull Muslims off buses
set houses alight One uncle still cries
when they mention his lost sister
*
It was a year before the election
(but we didn’t think of it as before anything)
Now the future we’re arriving in
feels rehearsed
*
Before I worked
at a magazine where I chose the photos:
I scanned through boys turned
to dusty statues
in bombed-out hospitals
men crying as they carry
little bodies
The search terms:
Syria hospital
Drone
Nazi gold brought me a soldier holding a crate of wedding rings
*
How do you know when the after begins?
An armed march against Jews in Montana
militias at the border
burned-out mosques, and Amira afraid
of a neon cross in the bed of a pickup near her building
There should be a name for this:
today’s newscast as prologue
Even as I watch
it feels like years ago
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
