Mantra & Squash by Elisabeth Gail

mantra

the glass is not empty you

have fallen asleep

not because of the wine

but because your brain has finished thinking

or

it has thought too much

let the glass shatter on the floor

and do not wake

let your body rumble

but do not let your eyes open

it is bleeding into everything

the empti

nes

              s




squash

everything is silent

sweat drips

down your cheek

the ball

it does not move

even when you blink

or breath

or swallow

you have a racket and

the room is cooling 

and so is the ball

They are waiting

in white sneakers and

navy shorts

and you are waiting too

for what ? 

rubber squeaks four 

times and

it gets quie ter

you stare and the ball

becomes less malleable

it won’t work if

you don’t move

your court will close soon and

the ball will be gone

and so will They

it is cold

heat the ball again

thirty seconds before

you start but

it has been thirty seconds since

it fell and

everything is silent

sweat drips

down your cheek

blink or breath or

swallow

They are gone.


“Both of these poems, ‘mantra’ and ‘squash’, have been collecting dust for some time now. I gave up on them, not because I don’t like them, but because it seems no one else does. They’ve both received handfuls of rejections from different magazines/journals, one said: ‘For the amount of space it takes up, it doesn't end up saying a whole lot.’ But I think maybe they just weren’t looking hard enough. I love these pieces—the space they take up, their ambiguity, their emptiness, their mundanity, all of it. Maybe I’m biased and I’m seeing things that aren’t there, but I hope someone else can read these poems and feel the things I felt when I wrote them, the things I feel when I re-read them again.”

Elisabeth Gail is a Melbourne writer, specialising in poetry and short stories. Her writing, like herself, is often small and strange. ‘I love short forms of writing because you can say something big with a few words; every word has to count, and the spaces in-between can speak as loudly as the words themselves.’ https://elisabethgail.wordpress.com

insta: @lissybethr

Previous
Previous

waiter-customer confidentiality, litany to the animal parts & stop falling in love with white people by Aries M. Gacutan

Next
Next

Patron Saint by Jessica Natasha Lawrence