ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Alison Stine's most recent book of poetry is Wait (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the Brittingham Prize, and her most recent book of fiction is The Protectors (Little A), an illustrated novella about graffiti artists. An NEA Fellow, she has received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is also a visual artist, and her paintings appear regularly in The Rumpus. A single mom, she lives with her son in the foothills of Appalachia, and works as a reporter.
Buying Emergency Contraception in Elkhart
What I want to give to you is done.
Eons ago, an ichneumoniae
hanging between ice.
Pebble chip in a windshield.
Filigreed drop. Wendy
waiting in the flies.
Hard work,
pushing the pill through the mesh
on my thirty-eighth birthday.
Everything I love is between me,
a train, and a night gym —
your back pressed against
my belly.
A memory of snow, sweetened
with vanilla, almost milk.
The children in Indiana have only scarves.
To keep themselves
warm, they run. I have been driving
past their little school.
Rutted roads. Aluminum
slide. A girl caught a rubber ball.
And only dark cars.
I thought I came across
a new creature one night:
fly limbs, phosphorescent…
but it was only a buggy,
stuttered with lights.
I believe there is beauty
in the starkness, but I don't
want to live there,
not among the plain
stars, not where I came from.
Some people,
I believe, are born only once.
Some people have never
been animals as we have:
hunted, driven forward
by our mouths. My last
morning, I noticed the bay
had frozen over.
You smiled. Sweetheart,
it's been frozen all along…
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
