ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Adroit, Sou'wester, Threepenny Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poems can also be found in several anthologies, including the Best Indie Lit New England anthology. She is the author of the chapbooks Sink and Drift, Creature Feature, and Dear Turquois, and the forthcoming full-length collections Dead Man's Float and Abandon. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.
Poem After the End of the World
Asked if I believe in God, I say I wonder
and the room stops. In the film someone
is making of my life — the one where
the car radio still provides the soundtrack
and my lipstick is always perfect and
I wear lipstick to begin with — the camera
slips and shudders. If we end with
the questioning, we're lost, and maybe
that happened anyway. On my hand,
a mantis, spring green and motionless,
so light I don't know when it appeared.
A friend once told me it might as well
be a roach or termite — they're all the same,
and evil houses itself in viscera and shell —
but she is absent, as I almost am, and
we have need for other things now.
After the 2016 election, I found myself re-evaluating many things, among them my belief in the inherent good of people, my relationship to the color orange, and my reluctance to become overtly political in my poems. Like many poets, I couldn't find it in me to write at all, and like many poets and non-poets alike, I didn't know how to process what had happened. A friend of mine gave me the idea to write "Poem After the End of the World" at the top of the page and see what happened. What happened is that I wrote poem after poem with that hyperbolic title, each one exploring a different aspect of my new attitude about the U.S. and our place in the world. Some of the poems kept some version of the title and some did not; some are directly political and some are not. All of them deal with the idea of realizing we may not have a complete picture at any time, but the process strengthened my belief that we need poetry — and art in general — now more than ever.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
