playing cross sections
Playing cross-sections
By Marie Gordon
Take a slice of my bone
As if I were a tree
And try to guess my age
From traces of old breaks
Take a piece of my brain
As if I were a chip
Insert it in your drive
Will you watch my story
Maybe you’ll hide your screen
Or turn the volume down
Even if you don’t please
Will you try not to judge
I wonder if you’ll cry
When you watch the sad parts
And that one violent scene
Will you understand me
Watch the story then see
If it matches the bone
Will you dismiss the tale
If the bone is too fresh
Or maybe hit rewind
When you write your results
Examine the bone’s marks
Magnify them to check
Maybe I’m a young bone
Without the thickest trunk
Lacking rings but holding
The density of life
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In some ways, so reminiscent of the late Sylvia Plath, self-absorbed, lyrical, full of allusions. Hard ultimately to match Plath’s exquisite wrenching metaphors, but for a young writer, Ms. Gordon shows great promise and her metaphors soar in an exquisite arc. “Lovely” penguin, in reality, seems to be often “lonely” penguin, for these poems resonate with lost love and inchoate attempts at finding meaning in the everyday things that surround us. Soon, I have no doubt, the “I” will give way to the universal, not too far away.