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  • about
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    • staff bios
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  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
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    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
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    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
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Glassworks

SELECTION OF POEMS
by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

a selection of poems from Sarah Fawn Montgomery | 2023

Glassblower
​

Pull me molten
            make me more pleasing

shapes, your vessel
            waiting to be filled

rough edges melted down
            with open flame, cut

to litter the floor
            beneath your boots

like a cigarette extinguished
            crushed beneath your strong

teeth, a glinting condom
            wrapper, the wilted receipt

from a gas tank
            to somewhere better

than this studio’s lonely,
            the furnace that never ends

the deliberate way, artisan,
            you stretch me shapeless

translucent and pliable
            shape me solid again

from sand and the discarded 
            shards of faulty others

our abstract erased
            to become undone

remade by your demand
            hand and steady breath

as though you are God,
            placing us after in the kiln

our glowing red rage left to cool 
            otherwise how easily we would crack.
Picture
Nyuso Za Nairobi, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
​

​Landscape                    

You mowed the asparagus
again, ground the tender
shoots between the blades

of a machine built to limit
things from growing, 
except weeds still claw 

through the foundation
and vines wind the well 
no matter how you curse

at the audacity, dedication
inspiring goldenrod and asters,
wild blackberry staining

your fingers deep like bruise,
groundhogs gorging
on clover you try to choke

out with too much seed,
the fence threatening 
to topple from the morning 

glories. I wanted to eat 
the asparagus, but you will not 
feed on what is wild.

It returns with my hunger--
a solitary shoot in our yard
that grows everything

but what it is you desire.

Picture

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