ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Gabrielle Spear is a poet, community organizer, and museum educator based in Queens and raised in Northwest Arkansas. She was named a Goucher College 2015 Kratz Summer Writing Fellow, a finalist in LUMINA’s 2017 Borders and Boundaries Nonfiction Contest judged by Leslie Jamison, and a 2017 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, fields magazine, Sukoon, The Hunger, Jet Fuel Review, and other publications.
venerability1 study
after solmaz sharif
i memorize the kinyarwandan phrase for
my name is not white person
tutsi dictator mistaken for christ
enshrined in every household
grenade attack in kicukiro unspoken of
and therefore did not happen
mama hand-washing my dirty underwear by lamplight
a hutu man telling his reconciliation story
to american tourists
machete-carved forearms
begging for change at kimironko market
crows tap dancing
on a bullet-stained church roof
polish nuns teaching the blind children of kibeho
about faith
nose structure once measured for ethnicity
mummified absent
1 in a rwandan accent, the english word for “vulnerable” sounds like “venerable.”
When I returned from my semester abroad in Rwanda, still in shock from all I had witnessed, I found comfort in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, where she considers the politics of grief and vulnerability. Who do we grieve and why? What are the ways our mourning holds prejudice? Isn’t vulnerability an act of venerability as well? What are the ways venerable gestures of state power actually indicate a government is built on fear of their own vulnerability? I wanted to play with these ideas and Solmaz Sharif’s poem “vulnerability study” offered me the perfect way to do so.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
