ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Mamie Morgan's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Nimrod, Four Way Review, Muzzle, Smartish Pace, The Oxford American, Cimarron, The Yalobusha Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, and Inkwell. She lives in the woods with her husband and their two pitbulls, Henrietta Modine and Wednesday Stewart.
Also by Mamie Morgan:
Kin
Letter to Yasha in my Third Period AP Lang Class Morning After That Girl She Likes Blocked Her on Instagram
Dance of Two Line Cooks
Everyone I’ve Danced With Is Dead.
The students have written about birds
because I’ve suggested heartbreak,
the loss of a farm, some senior
named Marcus sending all your private texts
to the group — any of it is capture, migration.
Yasha’s parents just split, which in any other
class wouldn’t be anybody’s business.
But this is poetry:
her dad driving that delusion of motorcycle
& refusing to pay for anything.
How about jackdaws
falling into the small production
of a quiet country no one has seen?
How about the hummingbirds
for whom my father demanded
clear sightlines as he died?
What about the girl I loved
who dropped a nest full of chicks
from her third story
hospital room
& fucking laughed.
Originally, this poem was very long and very bad. I was going through a big write-about-the-students phase. One had recently passed away, so if the class was writing about faucets or Nevada or tomato frogs — everyone was all really just writing about death. Anyway, as I said, it was bad. So then in the fall of this year, my husband coerced me into watching Downton Abbey, and there’s this moment where Lady Mary says something like, “Everyone I’ve danced with is dead!” I carried that line around a while — my father had just passed away, and too many friends from heroin, exes, students. One morning (December 5th), I woke and thought: I’m going to write a collection of poems all titled that line, and they’re all going to be about the dead, but they’re going to be shorter and lighter and a little Greek-chorusy. So then I also drummed up a sleeve of old poems that seemed cumbersome and dead and tried to cut them and resuscitate them. This is one of those. By slicing a whole ton, everything became more urgent. Little things. In the rough draft, it read, “How about a girl I knew…” But in revision I’d think, “I didn’t know her. I loved her.” And so on.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
