ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook, Honey in My Hair, and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has won a Writers' Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review's 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and Second Place in The Room Magazine's 2023 Poetry Contest. Her writing can be found in Gasher, Honey Literary, Osmosis, Thrush, and elsewhere. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
November 27, 2024
xx
— a golden shovel, after Sonia Sanchez
her briny kisses make homes on your
skin, barnacling your divine limbs
with desire & mauve lip stain. a fruit fly
you wave off
reminds you to breathe
in the fresh-cut mangoes that fall on the ground
when you, sweat-salted too, pull her closer, little
by little, with the verve of diving seabirds.
"xx" is a golden shovel after Sonia Sanchez's Haiku 8 of "14 Haiku" in that the last words of each of my lines represents a word from her short poem. I did make a few creative changes; for example, "the" from Sanchez's poem is now "breathe." As for content, I set out to write about desire, and I was drawn to Sanchez's haiku for its "birds" and flight. Queer love in particular is inherently a liminal space, and it is also one in which people find themselves exactly where they should be. The speaker here, in the form of the second person, is observant, even unsure, yet ultimately discovers her own empowerment and freedom.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
