Callie Plaxco | I am Thinking About Form and How I’d Like One

As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA in Creative Writing. Still in Wyoming, Callie lives with her husband, two small boys, and two big dogs. Her chapbook Dear Person is available at Dancing Girl Press and individual poems have appeared in Carve Magazine, Tinderbox, SWIMM, and Sugar House Review. She is the 2024 recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council's Neltje Blanchan Writing Award.

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Also by Callie Plaxco: Dear Person Sometimes when I am walking I wonder if there is blood coming out of my ears Like Paper

February 19, 2025

Callie Plaxco

I am Thinking About Form and How I’d Like One

I am thinking about how I once believed god was shaped like the back of a penny, an old man upon a throne set in copper. I am thinking of god brimming through the stained glass of the sanctuary, light colored by more light set in panes. I am thinking how when I can’t sleep it is often because I can hear my own heart pacing. As if somehow the heart migrated to my head, between the ears, or in my palm that rests below my cheek, or further, into the softness of my pillow. I am thinking about how many conversations I have had recently in which one person thinks another person must be a narcissist. I am thinking we must all be narcissists. I am thinking how tricky that word is to spell, to say, and then I am thinking of Narcissus at the banks and the water below, the way this window reflects my own deep shadow in the pre-sun darkness of morning. I am thinking of what I long for, which is this: to imagine the possibility of god like a penny, discarded but shining on the earth. I am thinking of how my mother always, without fail, will pick a penny from the ground and pocket it for later. For good luck, she says.