Page 29 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

Her Necklace Around My Neck
The former prisoner on the radio, again
beaten senseless, said in the course of it
he felt a white burning, a relentless light
like a blade, separate from who he was.
Not bound up in anything that had come before, his pain could be an innocent thing,
cut away from the self—the blessing and curse that come from an agony outside
splitting the body, his body not complicit,
not borne there by a parent’s genes.
I thought of my mother then, twinned in me, having waited all along, an endless engulfing. At night, marooned on my back,
I try to speak through
an awful rasp and mutter, my throat full of her.
Mathis’ eighth book of poems, After the Body: Poems New and Selected, will be published by Sarabande Books in July. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Best American Poetry, and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. The founder of the Creative Writing Program at Dartmouth College, and Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing, Emerita, she lives in East Thetford, Vermont.
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