By Ewen Glass
My sentences fall from hot air balloons,
distant and silent by the time they land.
Students don't sit in chairs, they sit through them.
I’m not finding the back.
Our topic is the writer’s voice, stories as
bodies of craft and past. I ask for acknowledgment
or note. I ask for an answer.
Someone is mumbling and it’s me,
and my own body reminds me in stomach
and spasm that when we were kids nothing
we could say would make a difference.
I begin to feel it.
Like gravity, holding us not down but together
in a room of right angles and roller blinds,
their listening. They’re listening.
There there.
I click onto the next slide.
Ewen Glass (he/him) is a lecturer and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and lots of self-doubt; on a given day, any or all of these can be snapping at his heels. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Bridge Eight, Poetry Scotland, Gordon Square Review and elsewhere. On socials (and in real life) he is pretty much ewenglass everywhere.
