ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Billie R. Tadros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at the University of Scranton. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and her M.F.A. in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of three books of poems, Was Body (forthcoming from Indolent Books in 2020), Graft Fixation (forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in 2021), and The Tree We Planted and Buried You II (Otis Books, 2018), and three chapbooks, Am/Are I (forthcoming from Francis House Publishing), inter: burial places (Porkbelly Press, 2016), and Containers (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She is currently working on a narrative research project exploring the gendered implications of traumatic injuries to self-identified women runners, and seeking to articulate a feminist injury poetics.
Associations with acid:
Tangerine rind and body citric like
critic like sex like loving not the flesh
but its surroundings.
Suggestions of remains stain
like coffee all over the car upholstery
the morning you called and said —
and the fruitflesh bits resurfaced
in the drain long after you’d left.
This poem is part of a manuscript whose project I’ve described as figuring queer grief — much of that manuscript is grieving the loss of a relationship between two women, but it’s also examining manifestations of mental illness, its impact on relationships, and the limits of language to represent it. This poem is specifically part of a series of “Associations” poems in the manuscript, in which the speaker resorts to metaphor to seek a language to approximate both the affliction of losing a lover’s affection, and that of having loved someone who experienced her own body as an affliction.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
