A beginner’s guide to glassmaking
Palms of my hands, I cast my lens
in them, my concave – being magnified.
Crux and frizz: spin of keratin.
and on concrete chip the teeth and swallow
of volition, and I spit and I am
decent as the pines
over city needling with pinprick lives
and how the pistol fires unloaded with a
cutpaper sound
the atavist boom of birds startled
scattering. I get the heart-swell
of postcards mouth to ribs. The glacier is vicious:
the weight of it, the striations. I am made
and undone, always, a blockade of veins:
how they churn – the height of it.
I shake open-handed to never meeting again,
and I saw it good and rounded, an etherizing:
I eat my razor which scalds me cold ekes out a sextant
I am a frail tongue – biting thing
though I could howl down
the planets, couldn’t we all,
but heavenly bodies don’t go gentle
never at all —
I lie sober down beside myself.
Alison Graham is a Norwich-based writer who also volunteers for Amnesty UK. She has work forthcoming in Fur-Lined Ghettos magazine, and her debut pamphlet, tin can white gown, is due for release with Pyramid Editions later this year. She has a Twitter, and more information about tin can white gown can be found here.