ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Rebekkah Leigh LaBlue studies creative writing, book publishing, and ornithology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been shortlisted by Glimmer Train, and she was a finalist for the 2018 Split Lip poetry contest. A prose reader for the Adroit Journal, she is pseudo-native to Asheville, NC.
A Dream in Which Gravity Is Intensified to the Speed of Light
and in which I do not miss the funeral : I leave nothing
of the apple for the birds : I still do not know him
longer than the three weeks I knew him
four years ago : hearing he got killed that way
is just as sad : hesitation is not pause but
a stop sign seen through a kaleidoscope : I do
not think to sit at home during the service :
windows toss soft pink into the aisles,
a perfume of bedroom cotton
or handshakes baked with Pacific salt : I
am less selfish : my nose is wrapped,
as a gift, in bright paper : the scent wafts past,
aimless : I do not mourn the could be
before a bloodless lily : I excuse myself
from gravity : his lids are drawn shut :
I press a finger to them anyway : I hope
they’ll mood-ring swirl and shift, reveal
the color pooled beneath : I don’t dream the one
in which they found his body or
could have found mine : the apple seeds take root,
eager, as if to say, this too will swallow you.
Mental illness in my experience is so often a tightrope balance of so many dichotomies, where it’s expected you’ll fall on one side or the other: joy/sorrow, responsibility/guilt, the self/that of those you care for most. But what happens when to care for those you love is to mis-care for yourself? How to justify want vs. need vs. obligation, arrange care in a hierarchy? “Better” isn’t a straight, exponential figure, or even a real qualifier in the context of mental illness; “what you can learn to live with” is more sufficient. What decisions can you learn to make, and then make again and again, so that it gets easier to look forward? This poem explores the surrealism of self-care when it rubs the wrong way against everything, when keeping alive guilt feels like the only way to keep alive the self.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
