ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Emma Miao is a student, poet, and pianist from Vancouver, BC, Canada. She is a commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2019, and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, Sine Theta Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Eunoia Review, and Blue Marble Review, among others. She is a poetry reader for Up the Staircase Quarterly and the co-founder and executive editor of Surging Tide Magazine, a Vancouver-based online literary magazine dedicated to empowering youth voices. She is recognized by the Poetry Institute of Canada and the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, and will be attending the Iowa Young Writers Studio 2020.
Winter in Distillation
I
We are the broken pile of bones
We are the paper and we are the string
We are the skin scraped clean by the stones
We are the limbs held loose by the sling
In the woods I hear sounds. Ghosts whisper down my neck.
This is a waning town — they murmur. This is a warbling wreck.
We are the cavities gutting the bark
We are the holly and we are the blood
We are the letters signed in the dark
We are the children born in the flood
Footsteps squelch on the mossy carpet. I wait for snow.
The gunshots ring out. What do we learn that we already know?
II
Quiet as rain, still as stone. Before long, the remnants
of this forest wisp into horns. Days pause in fleeting
moments, as ruffled feathers settle in silence. You said
lanquidity runs in the veins of this idle town.
You said wind follows the luckless, the ruined, the gone. It’s
1928 and rose hips and chrysanthemums dance on winter’s breath.
Look now: a sudden departure of crows, a plumage of blue,
a tapping of branches. You fill this oblique silence.
Here we are, dancing with the desecrate moon. Curling over
the leaves, nesting for years. Here, the bluejays sing.
The summer was cruel to us.
& then — silence.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
