Madeleine Corley is a poet by internal monologue. Some of her favorite things include acrostics, the word “nefarious,” and her roommate’s dog. She serves as the Poetry Editor at Barren Magazine. Her work has been featured in DARK MARROW, Moonchild Magazine, The Hellebore, and others.




Also by Madeleine Corley: displaced Two Poems Armstrong

Poets Resist
Edited by Kanika Lawton
June 30, 2019

Madeleine Corley

life sentence

I start each sentence like I’m guaranteed another. They keep lamenting last summer and I believe them even through this rain I don’t mind it this island will never stay warm the second paragraph following a description of The Great Barrier Reef: scientists are doing everything they can to stop the bleaching I look at my teeth in the mirror shining bright dead coral pressed together they scream silent pass like a billboard shouting hell on the highway I wonder how much tar they’d find once they juice me of my smiles — enough to fell an ocean ? But this winter was so much colder so you can’t say it’s warming I too have argued with air so in my next life I’ll come back as phytoplankton but next time with mouth and next time with hand shovels and next time with matches I stoke with my vowels and my words boil to exclamation point and my consonants leech from newly beached lime and you realize hope is not enough to breathe

“Life Sentence” was my processing of someone saying they didn’t mind the warmer weather if it meant better summers in Ireland (where I’m currently living). I wrote this as a response and a reminder to myself that hope can not fix our current predicament. Phytoplankton makes a lot of oxygen for the planet — the conversation between speaker and dismisser plays on the idea that oxygen grows fire and therefore world burning. So the more we talk and don’t act, the closer we are to flames.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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