ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Ellie Lamothe is a Sociology student, activist, and poet from K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). She’s passionate about feminism and collective healing, and is the founding editor of Laurels & Bells Literary Journal. Her work is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Riza Press, and Constellations.
Poets Resist
Edited by Michael Carter
August 17, 2019
Edited by Michael Carter
August 17, 2019
augury (love letter to the woman of my early twenties)
I.
i know you are not always ready to give and / receive
loving, like healing / is a practice / continuous / non-linear
you learned early
how to love dysfunctional / disorganized / demeaned
you were taught to offer love / as collateral
trauma as a transactional element / inherited / from a lineage
of volatile / habitual women
you will be 24 years old when your mother recalls being raped
she tells you casually / over brunch
as if it was not an ordinary day to begin with
tells you about the knife in the door that failed to lock / the asphyxiation
of memory
while you spread marmalade on your toast / contemplate hunger
of brutalized women
you have learned to construct desire
as more than an ideal / coerced from birth
to be the sacrificial lamb at the altar / of femininity
of lovers who dulled their sharp / edges
on your body and called it radical / called it tenderness / accidental
your love as more than the words / weaponized
by those who only sought to consume you / spit you out in shards
and claim you bloodied their mouth
your love as [w]hol[l]y / rooted in the soil / in community / in bone
the mythology of survival
II.
i know some days your love is / a harbinger of snarls
and teeth / of strangers pining for intimacy / on vibrant screens
gut filled with hibiscus
for virtual rituals / of heaven bound modernity
these ephemeral longings / of the timid
and the ravenous
this love that congregates
in your belly / that bellows / stakes claim
nourish it / and let the flesh ripen
love for your self can look like redemption
but it can also look like rage / let it move you to action either way
until your love no longer recoils / but demands sanctuary
honoured boundaries / afternoon soft serve kisses
passionfruit syrup sticky between fingers
to be dizzy with moscato and glittering / in the passenger seat
until your love / rewrites the narrative
as the omen / the great ceremony
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
