ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte. She is the author of the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), part of the Robin Becker series. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Poetry Editor at Literary Mama. Her work has appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review, the minnesota review, Raleigh Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Josephine Quarterly. She lives in Missouri with her wife and three children where she co-organizes the Downtown Poetry reading series.
The Silence of a Window
Like children and waistlines, leaves resist managing, and the parking lot branches are nearly bare. I can’t ever remember when they are timed to fall. This is the straggling time — worse than the naked brown. I’m embarrassed for the trees. Not for their exposure. What woman would dare refuse empathy for their spreading, how hands creep and slide and dip — persistent into every secret burrow? Stripped by wind and watched by passersby — don’t we know how to imagine that?
In this place, I memorize new refrains. What is happening to your body isn’t happening to your body. I’m embarrassed by the gratitude of trees. How must it feel to let go over and over? How lucky the bloom and return, the sweet blossom and breeze as if purple and blue were a current of traveling breath looking for home. I can do anything for fifteen minutes.
How might fuchsia settle to rest on my open arms? Green — unbreakable green — come to rest in my marrow? Inside this hospital room, I’m embarrassed for gratitude, the grandeur of my hope. In the electric pain, the blackblack center of the pain, is a silence I can’t explain to you now. I won’t ever know how to say silence, stripped naked in the glass, entered my room.
I wrote this poem in a hospital bed shortly after a spinal tap. In October 2019, I lost feeling in both of my legs and my ability to walk. Months later, I was diagnosed with MS. This is the first poem I wrote about the experience, and it is part of a manuscript that explores pain, both the experience of pain and the aftermath.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
