by Jessica Purdy
“I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I’d cry for a week.”― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
A parabola of grief bumps along a wall
like a yellowjacket in fall.
All that pavement and the sky
plunging into my head.
My daughter spoke blue
from under the skin of her wrist.
Don’t deride me
my noblest ideals.
I care about no one.
I need someone to pour myself into.
You’ll never feel lonely as long as
you have curiosity.
A self that dusts itself until it shines
even as it settles for the back of the shelf.
Let it be known there’s always hope.
I love everyone—
I’m brimming with their water.
Children will kill you but keep you living.
The air hears me say I think it but I’d never
as if someone were listening with care etched in their eyes.
It’s impossible to hear me crying.
Blue hydrangeas die in the throat of the vase.
Words that leave the body make room for more
to spill like anything overfilled.
The death that might make this life easier.
The body holds a word’s sound
but not its meaning. Leaves me asking:
How much water is enough to buoy me
even with rocks in my pockets
wrapped in these notes on hope?
“I need someone to pour myself into”—Plath’s Unabridged Journals
Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Emerge Literary Journal 