Ordinary Psalm with Sylvia Plath on the Radio
I carry my transistor outside to listen.
A bloated moon breaches the sky. Sweeping up the stoop,
I toss out a dustpan of dead flies and litter.
The human heart seems a wasteland. The boy I cheated on,
the one that bent my pinkie back
until it broke, before shoving me onto the dirty mattress
behind my school. Perhaps the poet is right,
the moon is a bad mother. Life is predatory, mine loved to say.
And you are perfect prey.
Not yet twenty, I am a perfect fool. I know nothing
about Plath or her suicide—
have no idea that her mouth, her lips are gone,
that this is only a recording
like a wineglass poured with darkness.
And yet this is what it sounds like
when a woman refuses to look away. When the mind can carry
the body anywhere—
can live bald and wild and blue
in this moment that stills the broom.
That smells like breath and pears and sweet decay.
A bloated moon breaches the sky. Sweeping up the stoop,
I toss out a dustpan of dead flies and litter.
The human heart seems a wasteland. The boy I cheated on,
the one that bent my pinkie back
until it broke, before shoving me onto the dirty mattress
behind my school. Perhaps the poet is right,
the moon is a bad mother. Life is predatory, mine loved to say.
And you are perfect prey.
Not yet twenty, I am a perfect fool. I know nothing
about Plath or her suicide—
have no idea that her mouth, her lips are gone,
that this is only a recording
like a wineglass poured with darkness.
And yet this is what it sounds like
when a woman refuses to look away. When the mind can carry
the body anywhere—
can live bald and wild and blue
in this moment that stills the broom.
That smells like breath and pears and sweet decay.
Julia B. Levine’s awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press, 2014), and first prizes in the 2019 Bellevue Literary Review, 2019 Public Poetry Awards, and 2018 Tiferet Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms, will be published in 2021 from LSU press.
Art: Molly Dunham