ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Eric Tran is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC and received his MFA from UNC Wilmington. He won the 2019 Autumn House Press Emerging Writer’s contest and his debut book of poetry, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, will be published in 2020. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review and elsewhere.
Scenes
does he speak / does he break
a fever / when you undress
the door / of his throat
with clarity / of rain held
in both hands / of drought
like petals / made silk
in the body / of a book
does he swallow / silence
like blood / dark wine
*
No dark, just lush, the fullest
green and braided leather. Teeth
and throatbare. Incisor and instep.
Two fists of crushed brocade
under your back. Swollen door,
fitted, deep thudding. Careless
window without a shutter.
The china tree in midnight:
Arms full of leaves
bitten into stars.
*
It’s easier, my blood
outside me Hotter
under sunlight Held
in a chipped teacup or between
your thighs I could take
us for roses this way
I could tender my hand
and see jam on your lips
*
I’d unshell you in the sun,
spill you on the hot baked brick.
Stained white with ready. Emptied,
right there in God’s open garden.
A bed from every swell of dirt,
plow each two knuckles deep
and two more wide. Make soft
the roots and stems. Tremble
the boughs naked of leaves.
Let the ground grow wet with fruit.
After resisting the movie for so long, I finally watched Call Me By Your Name on a long flight and was so moved I started writing down lines as I cried. And as time went on, I became more and more frustrated by the movie: it wasn’t necessarily about queer people nor were queer people involved in its production. In a lot of ways it wasn’t a queer story at all, and so the rest of the poem comes from trying to reclaim queerness from this narrative.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
