Today's Headline: "From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life"

View in browser   October 30, 2020 Ode to the First Time I Wore a Dress & My Mother Did Not Flinch torrin a. greathouse My palm still recalls the shape, crushed velvet’s soft-jagged pull that makes my thin jaw ring, my teeth a row of tiny bells. How it stained my skin’s silhouette the color of a newborn bruise, before first-puberty made mayhem of my skin, unbraided genes to watch their blueprint spill, moth’s unfinished body from split cocoon. In my mouth boyhood was a fawn, stomach lined with nettle blooms, a dog retching grass, bright red of a silver neck -lace torn from my throat by a boy who bit small moons from his fingernails & told me all the ways he could break my body & no one would even notice. He left my mouth dry as velvet, scrubbed from a buck’s bone crown, rouge across a tree’s pale face & I loved him for it. Wanted him to love me back like any -thing other than a boy. Window. Perfect pebble. Shooting star. Pen knife. Painted pair of lips. My mother helped me tighten the straps, lent me her smallest heels, & watched me dance with a violent boy’s gentle name on my tongue. I can’t imagine how both of them will see this velvet slip as nothing more than tender skin to be shed bloody from a boy to make from him a man. from the book WOUND FROM THE MOUTH OF A WOUND / Milkweed Editions READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward This poem arose out of two conflicting, but overlapping instincts. The first, my need to parse out my mother's encouragement for me to explore gender nonconformity in my childhood, juxtaposed with her transmisogyny after I came out. The second, to investigate my first experimentation with—what I then perceived as—drag, as a site of burgeoning queer desire. The meeting point: how both threads lead me back, inexorably, toward violence.   torrin a. greathouse on "Ode to the First Time I Wore a Dress & My Mother Did Not Flinch" "From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life" "Plath herself felt, as she wrote Beuscher, that these poems were 'written on the edge of madness,' and Clark astutely observes that 'Edge,' the last poem Plath wrote, 'gives the uncanny impression of having been written posthumously.' But there was also the 'iron will to live,' as Plath described it to Clarissa Roche, a friend from Smith who visited her at Court Green, the house in Devon she had shared with Hughes for less than two years. If only that will had prevailed." viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES Poetry Daily stands with the Black community.  We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter. Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community What Sparks Poetry: Dan Beachy-Quick on "Alcman 89" "Studying my declensions, conjugating those verbs, the endless rote memorization of vocabulary, all felt meaningful in relation to this wild, instinctive possibility—that thinking was the body’s work, that apprehension in all its senses (grasping, fearing, knowing) was the thinking poetry could offer, a thought that is a sensation, as natural and instinctive as the hawk’s dive is to hawk or the mouse’s hiding is to the mouse, all eyes bright with purpose." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com.  If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2020 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency