"On Being Asked to Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing" & "Loneliness is like glitter"
Two Poems for Being Sad at the Beach
For formatting reasons, these poems are best viewed on a wide screen.
On Being Asked to Be More Specific When it Comes to Longing
After Carl Phillips, Shauna Barbosa & Claire Shepherd
Picture a beach in Florida, four years
later. You’re reading that poem by Shauna Barbosa
about the lover who kisses her legs.
Everyone you love is worried for you—
Your brain goes bad in the heat.
Picture a one-piece swim suit
in purple. The lucky year of falling in love
is three months gone already.
Everyone you love is living-life tan—
Only you have big-city skin.
Picture yourself naked in a hotel
mirror. If you can’t let a lover witness your despair
you will have to do it yourself.
You trace the blue-green veins
beneath your pale, doughy skin
and want to cry.
Not even the sun has touched you this summer.
Not even the sun. By Jane McBride
Loneliness is like glitter
It gets on everything I touch. Leftover from dorm room parties and junior proms and art projects pinned to my parents’ fridge I find it in bed-sheets and in bathtubs, its grease in the crease of my skin Like the pigment of a tree frog, its brightness warns of poison. It catches the eye just to turn it away The taste? Sunscreen and sea salt. The coconutty concoction of an imaginary beach You’ll have to take my word for it, I guess. Dust is still dust if it shines— if you toss it in the air and call it confetti It never comes off. I don’t know if I want it to I find I feel less of myself in its absence.
By Jane McBride
NOTES FOR “On Being Asked to Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing”
The title of the poem is borrowed from a Carl Phillips’ poem of the same name.
The last three lines of the poem are inspired by lines from Shauna Barbosa’s “GPS”: You kiss the back of my legs and I / want to cry. Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.
The poem is the result of a prompt from my friend and fellow writer, Claire Shepherd.
Read the annotation/analysis of this poem below:
