ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Alec Prevett (they/them) is a human from Atlanta. Their recent poems have been featured in Hobart, Redivider, Lammergeier, and others. They are pursuing an MFA in fiction from Georgia State University.
Toward Some Meager Body
Your wrists in the sun
light. The knots of vein beneath.
The oceanpaint blood in them
coursing from your fingertips, rivers
toward some meager body
of water. Or the roads on an old map
on the wall of the room of your life. Body
as house, body as vehicle, body as the map
smoothed unceremoniously across the dashboard.
And really what if it were that easy,
to take your own hands and flatten your whole self
across a surface, to look at the entirety, say ah,
now the way is clear. What if you, the person you are,
could see yourself from a cartographer’s point of view.
Red vein for road, blue for back to the start, skin the unfurled paper:
now your body is simple, everything defined and radiating
from the heart. But this is not the truth. No single part of you
is a river. Your veins: a trick of the light, what little of it
can pass through the parchment of you. When you let go
of its corners, you will snap into yourself
as a flower in snow bunching
its sudden
fist.
Perhaps this will be so literal as to be uninteresting, but the poem really began because I was blankly staring at my own wrist while at work, where sunlight pours through the windows in a really lovely way. This made me remember a weird tid-bit of info I’d been told as a child about how blood is blue when there’s no oxygen in it. In trying to confirm that, I found out that our veins, though all being varying hues of red, can appear differently to us because of the way light travels through the surface of the skin (or so the internet tells me). This effect of course varies on the tone of your skin. If you’re like me and have incredibly pale skin, they might appear blue when held up to the light, but that’s not actually the case! I was shocked because I’d always just accepted that as truth, that I had blue blood and red blood (yes, there is some shame in admitting I didn’t know this truth till I was 23). This sudden demystification about an aspect of my body I had sort of accepted as fact really resonated with me as someone who has been wrestling for years with body dysphoria and gender non-conformity — that something I had been told and assumed about myself for years could actually be wrong.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
