ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Emily Rose Cole is the author of Love and a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems in women's voices from Minerva Rising Press. Her work has received awards from the Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Nimrod, The Pinch, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University and is pursuing her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She firmly believes in the relationship between poetry and magic.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Definitions
How Grandmother Tells It
You know our tale: how, against advice, the girl
(alone) strays from the path that's meted out for her
to sip a pearl of honeysuckle, talk to a stranger.
She risks too much, the moral tells us. She shouldn't go.
It's dangerous (for girls) in the dark wood. I know
(don't you?) what fate squats in that bed — rough fur,
eyes bright as fraying wire, canines capped in red —
it's only when (somewhere in act two) the axman's
grinning blade portends rescue that she survives:
humbled, grateful, traumatized enough to know not
to go out but to stay in, latched to the safety of the cradle,
the kitchen. (Postscript — she'll take the axman's trade:
her hood for a gold ring.) After, we kiss our sleepy grand-
daughters, as if a kiss has ever spared a girl from anything.
In the days following the 2016 election, I thought a lot about how many myths and stories there are designed to warn women away from ambition, even if that "ambition" is as simple as walking to her grandmother's house by herself. As a result, when ambitious women fail to achieve a goal, (any goal, from running for President to walking down the street without being harassed) the narrative often goes something like: "well, what did she expect? This is what happens when women try to do ambitious things." I wrote this poem to try to expose (and, I hope, problematize) this moral, and what it stands for in our culture. As empowering and important as it is to reimagine Red as an axe-weilding wolf-slayer (see Carol Ann Duffy's stunning poem "Little Red-Cap" for a version of this), I think it's also important to tell the tale exactly like it is, but pay close to the bleakness of the narrative, how the narrative is perpetuated, and how true the moral shouldn't still be, both for little girls, and for the grandmothers who so often tell them this story.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
