ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Alyse Bensel is the author of Spoil (SFASU Press, 2024) and Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) as well as three chapbooks, including Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Cream City Review, Pleiades, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, where she is an associate professor of English at Brevard College and director of the Looking Glass Rock Writers' Conference.
Also by Alyse Bensel:
Spoil
Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian
Dear Self
February 18, 2026
Obedient Plant
Physostegia virginiana
I once bent and remained there,
like pipe cleaners, like baby dolls,
like fabric flowers, the imitation
mimicking the real thing. He twisted
me every which way, commanding
me to stay there. Oh, I was kept in check.
When I spread my limbs, I propagated,
populating the whole room with a thousand
silent blooms. He ripped me out
of the carpet, the walls, the floorboards.
I survived underneath the foundation
of his family’s cookie cutter home
and its carefully maintained lawn.
I carved a smile on my plastic face.
I spat bloom after pretty bloom
to distract him from the rhizomes
that, no matter how hard he pulled,
kept dividing into more runners.
I made it out of there alive, a real,
pliant girl, nothing better and more
beautiful and surviving than a weed.
When I first moved into my new home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I planted a flurry of obedient plants. Their soft pink flowers, easily pliable, open late in the season, attracting hummingbirds and a host of bees and beetles. Despite its namesake, it's also an aggressive plant, so aggressive it has now supplanted the mint that once ruled the patch of lawn by my porch. This poem uses the obedient plant as the central metaphor in an attempt to articulate survival during and in the aftermath of abuse. The poem's neat couplets mimic ideas of suburban propriety and goodness, while the rhizomatic obedient plant uproots convention and interrogates what is deemed worthy in that particular landscape.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
