ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Anna Meister is author of the chapbook Nothing Granted (forthcoming, dancing girl press) & holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she served as a Goldwater Writing Fellow. A Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net nominee, her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Offing, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Vector Press, & elsewhere. A recipient of honors from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Anna is based in Des Moines, IA.
Also by Anna Meister: Two Poems Making Sense from Nothing Granted
June 22, 2016
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If I didn't wait for you to connect the dots, never drank vodka in Ellyn's bed before whiskey in my own, if we never toasted to Klonopin before I cut my jeans into uneven short-shorts for the party, then I didn't dance over laps in a dark room with all the couches pushed against walls like drunk mouths, if I didn't have trouble walking back to the dorms, didn't say do it anyway when the stranger told me no more condoms, then I didn't regret it, didn't think the purple light romantic, compare my bruises to birds, show them off at first, if I didn't lose my words in a field for hours the day after, then I never had to be taken care of, didn't fall over on the way to the bathroom, if I didn't tell you the long list of what hurt, sing good lord it feels like I'm dying or slam the door & play Suicidal Thoughts on high, if I wasn't high, then I wasn't nineteen, it was never October, if I wasn't responsible for all the bottles strung from our backyard tree, if nothing evil was at work there, if I wasn't in debt to the hospital, if the letter wasn't addressed to my friend resting at the bottom of a well, I was never the friend, never planning so carefully to disappear, if no one left a book outside my room, if no one left, if my mother didn't come to save me, then she didn't have to come, if I never went to Vermont or ended up pinned down & once again purple, if we weren't walked in on, then it didn't get worse from there, there weren't mountains behind my eyes, if I wasn't quiet the whole ride home, if home was never Iowa, if I was never here, then this is not the memory
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press. All contents © the author.
