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