ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Steve Bellin-Oka earned his MFA from the University of Virginia and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. He is the author of two chapbooks, O Frankenstein (Blue Trouser Press, 2003) and Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017). His first book, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, is forthcoming in 2020. The recipient of a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, he has also received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Arts. His poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other publications, and his interviews with other poets appear in Adroit and Mississippi Review. He lives in Portales, New Mexico.
Also by Steve Bellin-Oka:
Vita Poetica
Postcard to John, Overlooking Barachois Beach, Late May
Ghazal To John, From Exile
Cri de Coeur in White
for Justin
My life’s a film, misthreaded,
burning away: fresh snow, spilled
semen, candle tallow of middle-age.
White’s the absence of color
or every color at once. Ash
and chipped piano keys, spokes
of fractured bone ripped through
nylon umbrella skin. Raw berry
white on an early spring currant
branch. Pale riderless horse,
your hooves sully the clear
wan field with half-moons
of grief. China white he boiled
in spoons, white ligature to raise
his porcelain veins. Before we gave
his body over to fire and smoke,
we set a captive dove free. It circles
the trees and is gone: after six
blank years without him still I
can’t say whether I am of the saved
or of the damned, the ones
who cry out in their furious white
voices, Lord, when did you ever
reveal yourself to us? When?
This poem was written for my nephew, who died in 2012 from a heroin overdose at the age of 20. His overdose occurred on what would have been his mother’s birthday — she’d passed away from adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer, two years earlier, which had been hard on all of us, but particularly him. He was a middle child, like me, and I’m not surprised he turned to heroin to manage his emotions. He’d always been a sensitive kid, and was facing what looked like insurmountable challenges at the time. At the same time, for a lot of reasons, I felt like I’d failed him after his mother’s death. I still feel that way — had I treated his heroin use as a symptom of depression and alienation rather than a moral failing, maybe he’d still be alive now. I chose the cri de Coeur form because it’s essentially a poem of complaint and anguish, a poem in which the speaker is taking himself to task for failing someone at a crucial moment. The poem memorializes my nephew as it surveys the speaker’s current life and his sense that most of it has been wasted, much the way James Wright does in “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” At the same time, I wanted to convey my own understanding that addiction is a force beyond our control. The body needs what it needs and will not be denied. The end of “Cri de Coeur in White” invokes the parable of the sheep and the goats in the New Testament to ask an unanswerable question — if we fail in our care of another, yet that other does not want to be “saved,” how can resolve this moral paradox?
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
