ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Maya Owen writes, sings, and communicates gentle, loving things to trees, just in case. She is currently pursing a BA in English Literature from Goldsmiths University of London. Her work has been (or will be) featured in publications including The Adroit Journal, Dialogist, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Cleaver Magazine, and Nat. Brut, and been nominated for a Best of the Net award.
Diptych for the First and Last Women on Earth
The First Woman on Earth
Survival here’s a wild dismantling.
What don’t we owe to breath’s bright chisel? Blood
hoards the brilliance of air,
ferries red boats from shore to shore —
boats with women aboard, women in grief’s constricting
crinoline, women with pearls in their mouths.
This is what it means to mother.
How is it that we never reach the end of unfurling? Who tells the body
what to become? Intrusions of beauty
are intrusions, still —
life in the cup of flesh,
after so much
mineral silence.
The Last Woman on Earth
There’s no limit to life’s astonishment
for itself — always the chamber we were born in
turns out to be an antechamber; the discovery
that explained everything
was another
vestibular fever.
Dear mothers, on your way to me, deftly
embezzling lustre —
won’t you look up from your sex, your funerals,
your revolutions, your work in the fields
to a sudden cart of apples overturned on the road; the horses
that drop their dark necks
to retrieve them,
and think, for no reason, here is God,
or here is the real cusp of joy? And won’t it be true because you thought it?
This poem is a love letter to all the women I know and to those who came before me, through whose lives — ordinary or extraordinary — mine is possible. To queer women, mad women, women of colour or faith that made or makes their very existence an act of resistance, especially: I love you, thank you, you are not forgotten. And to those yet to come: may your world be a softer place. I hope we do right by you. I aim to.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
