ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Originally from upstate New York, Roseanna Alice Boswell currently haunts the Oklahoma prairies with her husband and their three cats. She is the author of Hiding in a Thimble from Haverthorn Press, and her chapbook, Imitating Light, was the winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review 2021 chapbook competition. Roseanna's second full-length collection In the House | In the Woods is forthcoming with Cooper Dillon Books. She holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and is a PhD candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared in: RHINO, The Missouri Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Bones I Get From My Mother
August 21, 2024
Dragon Goes Through the Change of Life
Do you know how much worse a hot flash is
when you already hold fire in your lungs?
Each night I drown the sheets in ice water,
try to keep cool, try to not snap at my husband’s
fur unbearably warming our pillows. I am not
sorry, I suppose, to leave birth control
behind. To not worry each time he says let’s not
bother with a condom tonight — what’s one more
mouth to feed? We have enough love to spare.
& we do. But I don’t want another baby,
another year of eggs & hatching. Hundreds
of diapers. I miss feeling fierce, burning fields
— I miss my work. Miss the taste of smoke
that signaled more than breakfast.
In the tradition of Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, Dragon and Donkey from the Shrek franchise are a couple whose humor largely derives from their size disparity. Miss Piggy’s femininity is over the top, her love for Kermit too loud, too much, too desperate. Dragon, too, is too large to play femininity straight. Her first encounter with Donkey hinges on the audience’s collective gasp from her eyelashes. She’s a girl dragon! It is, of course, not so difficult to trace the fatphobia and transphobia that lace through these tropes and stereotypes. But unlike Piggy, who is inarguably a fat icon, Dragon does not get to speak. Everyone else in the franchise talks: gingerbread men, animals, ogres, but Dragon moves through her narrative in relative domestic obscurity. This is my Roman Empire. I can’t stop thinking about Dragon. So, I wrote some poems about her, imagining what she might have to say. This is one of them.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
