In this story there are two sisters.
One is a case study being held under observation.
Her day starts with pharmaceuticals, pins and needles.
Good morning. Tell me. Confess this.
You said last week you would make the effort.
Set the wheel in motion. Release all the silver
Linings of the clouds of your surface tension.
Tell me the words you would like to hear.
Make yourself happy. It’s a sin not to try.
Blue is the sky. Blue is the swimming pool.
Blue are the building blocks, paint, and the box of rye
Toasted crackers, the earthenware, the plates,
And my high school swimming costume
With the white stripes that I changed into in
The school bathroom. Lap after lap. I felt lucky.
I use blue crayons to draw vowels and consonants.
I’m chained to them. Built a home for them
Mapped out inside my mind’s eye’s atlas.
I want the beauty, the purity, the suicidal illness
Of innocence, the pleasure of English literature
And the withering heights of it. I fell for you
Because there was something about a paradise
About you. Something exotic like an avocado
In a suitcase in Sylvia Plath’s iconic bell jar, like
An American who puts on a fur coat before
She turns the key in the ignition and fills her lungs
And head with carbon monoxide. I am a Romantic.
The war poets dead and buried. They never
Completely recovered from the war. Slaves every one.
In the end aren’t we all slaves, take the housewife
For example, the poet or the Romantics?
The other sister is bored with life. She has so much
Money she doesn’t know what to do with it.
So she gets a visa and goes to America, Thailand, and India.
She never has to phone collect from overseas.
When I look up at the night sky I know
There are stars, the moon, the Milky Way.
Perhaps Milton is looking down at me a father-figure.
Inspiring me like Rainer Maria Rilke or Goethe.
As they stretched their arms outwards
Toward imagination so do I. Imagination
And the ‘voice’ can be complicated, complex,
And psychological, and I’ve learned so can I.
Author Bio:
Abigail George, is a feminist, poet and writer who contributes bimonthly to a symposium on the Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine. She is the recipient of two National Arts Council Writing Grants, one from the Centre for the Book and the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council. She was born and raised in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, educated there, in Swaziland and Johannesburg.
She has written a novella, volumes of poetry, and collections of short stories. She is busy with her brother putting the final additions to a biography on her father’s life. Her literary endeavours has been anthologised in Poems for Haiti, Animal Antics, a South African Writer’s Circle anthology, the Sentinel Annual Literature Anthology and The Sol Plaaitjie European Union Poetry Anthology IV. She has been published numerous times in print in South Africa and online in other countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey and Zimbabwe, Canada, England, Finland, and the United States. All of her books are available on Amazon.
One is a case study being held under observation.
Her day starts with pharmaceuticals, pins and needles.
Good morning. Tell me. Confess this.
You said last week you would make the effort.
Set the wheel in motion. Release all the silver
Linings of the clouds of your surface tension.
Tell me the words you would like to hear.
Make yourself happy. It’s a sin not to try.
Blue is the sky. Blue is the swimming pool.
Blue are the building blocks, paint, and the box of rye
Toasted crackers, the earthenware, the plates,
And my high school swimming costume
With the white stripes that I changed into in
The school bathroom. Lap after lap. I felt lucky.
I use blue crayons to draw vowels and consonants.
I’m chained to them. Built a home for them
Mapped out inside my mind’s eye’s atlas.
I want the beauty, the purity, the suicidal illness
Of innocence, the pleasure of English literature
And the withering heights of it. I fell for you
Because there was something about a paradise
About you. Something exotic like an avocado
In a suitcase in Sylvia Plath’s iconic bell jar, like
An American who puts on a fur coat before
She turns the key in the ignition and fills her lungs
And head with carbon monoxide. I am a Romantic.
The war poets dead and buried. They never
Completely recovered from the war. Slaves every one.
In the end aren’t we all slaves, take the housewife
For example, the poet or the Romantics?
The other sister is bored with life. She has so much
Money she doesn’t know what to do with it.
So she gets a visa and goes to America, Thailand, and India.
She never has to phone collect from overseas.
When I look up at the night sky I know
There are stars, the moon, the Milky Way.
Perhaps Milton is looking down at me a father-figure.
Inspiring me like Rainer Maria Rilke or Goethe.
As they stretched their arms outwards
Toward imagination so do I. Imagination
And the ‘voice’ can be complicated, complex,
And psychological, and I’ve learned so can I.
Author Bio:
Abigail George, is a feminist, poet and writer who contributes bimonthly to a symposium on the Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine. She is the recipient of two National Arts Council Writing Grants, one from the Centre for the Book and the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council. She was born and raised in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, educated there, in Swaziland and Johannesburg.
She has written a novella, volumes of poetry, and collections of short stories. She is busy with her brother putting the final additions to a biography on her father’s life. Her literary endeavours has been anthologised in Poems for Haiti, Animal Antics, a South African Writer’s Circle anthology, the Sentinel Annual Literature Anthology and The Sol Plaaitjie European Union Poetry Anthology IV. She has been published numerous times in print in South Africa and online in other countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey and Zimbabwe, Canada, England, Finland, and the United States. All of her books are available on Amazon.
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