ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Author photo by Caitlin Vazquez
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky, currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Sundog Lit, Poem-A-Day, Frontier Poetry, Nimrod, New South, and Southeast Review, among others. Her translations are published in Ezra and forthcoming in Mid-American Review, RHINO, The Massachusetts Review, and New England Review. Her chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020) was selected by Danez Smith for Cave Canem's 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize. Davis is an MFA student at New York University.
Also by Marissa Davis:
My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak
Psalm for the Unloved Body
1 all we share is our hunger & we
hunger for penance. so we pray for a banquet of stonings. so we pray to
be thrown onto a pyre of shattered lyres, 2 we could incinerate beside
ourselves, say for once we were together, in fact the last song left unb
roken. 3 we have always been both bound & breaking — edenless where
gaze makes either gagged angels or beasts of us. 4 what I mean is even
now I am thirteen shaking on a street corner after a grown man says he
wants to lick my breasts. even now I can’t stop hearing fat fat little nig
ger girl who would ever want you & screaming who said it who said it
was it my whole good-soiled country was it me. 5 o my body, my little
noose, my little split-yarn slipknot, how we sunder, if we sunder it is on
ly to save us. each of us the red sea each of us one hand of a weary prop
het. we cleave homeland from homeland we rift valley we sift through
the deaf land’s fingers I become untouchable 6 & to thank you I write lo
ve love love love love on your palms 7 until the word becomes only a gut
string’s numb staccato. now it means nothing 8 & can’t be taken from us.
now it means body could you ever be mine again? back to a little laugh-
cheeked brown girl dancing naked in the summer rainstorms, mine? now
it is a tiny scythe you carry in your cheek & I pretend it doesn’t scratch
9 all we share is our hunger so we pray for a harvest of blunt blades. so we
pray to unswallow the skeleton key. to be re-locked, re-latched, re-hatched
into a small thing nested. so we pray for a hailstorm of doves: that singing,
that singing, such grace it’s a cruelty, my voice almost remembering the
way it felt to shelter in your mouth: not a blankness, 10 but truth stunning
those hard muscles: & fire, & flight
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
