ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Sage is a creative writing undergrad and Blue House fellow at Elms College. Their work appears/will appear in Banango Street, Ellis Review, Sooth Swarm, Stirring, The Penn Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and elsewhere. As a slam poet/spoken word artist, they often wander Massachusetts looking to throw down in the name of gender expression.
Also by Sage:
In An America w/out Guns
Upward Streamers
To the Straight Man Who Called Me Faggot Upon Finding Out I Was a Faggot
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Orlando, FL — June 12, 2016
How To Deal With Distance
Stars weave shapes and wait for us to find them.
Listen, create something so large it can be seen
all over the universe or by two kids
with a country between them.
Wherever we go from here let it be a place
of willow groves with tire swings on every branch.
Skate parks full of boomboxes where beautiful boys smoke
on the tube pipes and beautiful girls kick
mad flips over their heads. Let it be rest.
The faces of passing things are the ones we ignore
until they’re too close to call
strangers—then they’re in our house
saying the sun is dead and the stars have stopped building.
Don’t stop building, whatever you do, don’t stop.
This is important:
make a boat and fill it with things that burn, then douse it in gas.
Watch how the gasoline soaks into the fibers of the boat.
Your ark of burning will carry everything of our loneliness
into my house of leaves blowing through the city.
I wait for your embers.
I reach for the smoke.
I wrote this poem for the reaching between people who are kept apart: emotionally, mentally, physically, temporally. Sometimes we are separated by more than the distance between states or countries; sometimes we are kept separate by our own means, and it's in these times we reach for others. The desire to connect is a strong one, one of our oldest impulses. I wrote this poem to mourn the distance people place between themselves. To celebrate the strangers we fall for on subways. To remember the times we've looked up in fear or loneliness and found a hand reaching out to us, full of love.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
