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29 Sept 2023
JP
Seabright
Full Moon
Oct 14th
lips
Sep 15th
An erasure of
Sylvia Plath’s Tulips
It is winter here quiet
I am myself nobody
nothing I have given up
my history my head shut
everything in impossible
body smoothing numbness
I have lost myself sick
of smiling hanging
swabbed loving scared
I have never been pure
lie empty free
ask nothing dead mouths
lips are too red they hurt
me their redness my
wound sudden tongues
round my neck I watch
lips turn to me slowly
widen shadow the sun
I have no face vivid
lips eat the air
breath filled like a river
sunken walls warming
lips like dangerous
animals opening the mouth
of my heart red bloom
I taste the sea
Behind the poem...
It was during a pandemic summer that I first read Sylvia Plath's poem Tulips. So many words leapt out at me; it felt like there was another poem beneath Plath's, gasping for breath. Plath uses red tulips in contrast to the starkness of white hospital walls. What emerges from my sparser erasure is a more abstract rendering of illness and otherness: lips are red with blood, not love – this difference highlighting the rawness of Plath’s imagery.
