ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Ray Ball grew up in a house full of snakes. She is a history professor, a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated poet, and an editor at Alaska Women Speak. Her chapbook Tithe of Salt came out with Louisiana Literature Press in the spring of 2019, and she has recent publications in descant, Human/Kind Journal, Rivet, and SWWIM Every Day. You can find her in the classroom, in the archives, or on Twitter.
Also by Ray Ball:
Tithe of Salt
The Women's Frescoes in the Palazzo Chiaramonte
when Chen Chen tweets about deer in a poem
Concha
I bear the tattoo of a shell upon my back even though I know that in some countries the word for shell also means cunt.
Something I have been called more than once.
There.
I left it passive for my dead friend who thought the passive voice underused and who jokingly called me a cunt once. Maybe twice.
No me acuerdo bien. Mourning plays tricks with memory.
I have learned where not to say coger. And yes, to say estoy corriendo también sometimes when I’m not.
Out on a run the breeze caressed me when I stopped to urinate behind some bushes. Behind a bush, my cunt pulsated.
Un campo de las estrellas is a phrase used to describe Compostela. I peed behind many bushes on my way there.
Pilgrims had relieved themselves on that path for centuries. But somehow Galicia smelled of meadows and invasive eucalyptus.
It is said that these trees were sown by a monk returning from travels. I used the passive voice —
there.
Make it active: I touch the shell when I want.
I wrote the first draft of "Concha" one morning after remembering a conversation I had had with a good friend of mine from graduate school who had recently passed away. One memory — a friendly disagreement about the passive voice and him teasingly calling me a cunt — led me to other fragmented associations of vulgar words for genitalia and to thinking about other times I have been called derogatory names. Embarrassment formed more links of association. I recalled times when, living abroad, I had committed faux pas by making too literal translations from English to Spanish or by forgetting the colloquial boundaries of Spanish vernaculars. It felt powerful to play with the idea of passive versus active in this piece. I left behind some of the shame I had felt, as I meditated on the interior and external experiences of having gone on a pilgrimage symbolized by a conch shell. "Concha" was a way for me to begin a kind of reclamation.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
