ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer's Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. She is a Book Editor with Indolent Books, Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelances for Vinyl Me Please, Complex, Earmilk, NBC News Think and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts and elsewhere.
Self-Portrait as Itolia
i tell myself i'm above capitalism,
but get angry when my package
isn't delivered on time.
sun, you touch my window & i wait
for my parcel like a woman hoping
her dead husband would finally pull
his body from the battlefield. how he called me a bitch
because i creased a page in the book he's reading.
his name, a loose tooth in my mouth.
history repeats itself. history drags itself
out of the water. history drags its shadow over memory.
memory & history sit on opposite ends of my dinner table.
i pour them both a cup of black tea.
memory pulls at its face & begins to unravel,
asks me, what of yours has gone missing?
the chiaroscuro of light haloing his body hair,
his hands tracing the dry want of my mouth.
he says, i want to wake every day and choose you
i saw him naked but that doesn't mean
i recognize him in daylight.
i say, don't promise me that. i know this world.
buzzfeed tells me old lovers are apologizing
for past transgressions. an ex-friend says,
i don't mean to sound like an ex-boyfriend
but i miss you & want you back.
my best friend said god made me short
so i can't grab grown men by the scruff of their neck.
there are so many names i've been called,
i said to memory, but none of them belong to me.
every day i look out my window
like a woman who missed out on her life
being everyone's something else.
fuckboys on twitter pray to their god,
Future. i'm lonely, but at least i belong to myself.
history drinks from its cup, asks me to say something true:
i long for the days when men went to war & never returned.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
