Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections. In turn, the featured poets will introduce poems they love. Happy April!
Today’s featured poet is Brandi George, author of the forthcoming collection Gog.
MY BEST FRIEND AND ME
At ten, too old
for dolls, we hide them.
The toy bin snaps
like a sacred book’s
binding. While our parents
sleep, we write ourselves
gods, and the simple plot
we began spins from us until
the characters start
to question the rules of
their universe; they do
terrible things; they horrify
and excite us until morning.
And I wish I
could end here, but the dolls
are already changing faces,
appearing in drawers. My mother’s
car doors are opening
by themselves, and the house
is cold, cold
as the halls between biology
and gym. We fail
our classes. Someone yells
lesbians; the word spits
like the fire pit where
my stepfather burns
dolls, poems, stories thick
with dialogue. He calls
the exorcist, whose business card
was given to him by Pentecostal
ministers. These same men
guide me through
a twelve-step recovery program
for the possessed. I renounce
yoga. My parents
divorce and we move
to another town. My little cousin
dies, but I dream it first.
______________________________
Caleb has chosen to introduce “Poetry Is Stupid and I Want to Die” by Sandra Simonds.
She says: Sandra Simond’s poem, “Poetry is Stupid and I Want to Die,” collapses in on itself, its title, its insistence that “Every day is the dream of the desiccated Virgin Mary’s head / who hovers above my body to mock the lush plants to / capture the line vanishing, the threshold / vanishing, the apartment / vanishing, to connect one vanishing point / with another.” The effect is a sort of ecstasy, a dissolution of the mother, the origin point, and a sacred nothingness that is terrifying and exhilarating.
______________________________
Brandi George grew up in rural Michigan. Her first collection of poetry, Gog, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2015. Poems from this manuscript have appeared in such journals as Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, and The Iowa Review. She currently resides in Tallahassee, where she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University.
