Ghazal with reference to Sylvia Plath

A part of your body ached, the doctor pressed it. Said—fine
here, take these, Sylvia. But you replaced the pills with music. Fine.

You knew enough to be a woman, left a crescent moon in a lint
of red on the beer can. In a library, in noonday, I said I’m fine.

I raised my heels—found a hardback titled The Letters of Sylvia Plath.
The cover, a photograph of you in sophomore. Distant years appeared fine.

My mother passed a year before sophomore. I drank vacancy like liquor.
Tulips in spring were extra baggage. Dead nooks and crannies were fine.

A professor insisted I visit your old house in Devonshire. I spat a sea of whiff.
I recovered the sunset, swallowed it like a eulogy, like sperm. It tasted just fine.

Men pretended to be in cahoots, drunk, rode horses. I ran toward strawberry fields,
picked a few with bare hands. I made ghosts out of burnt muslin, black and fine.

You were made historical. I became anti-elegy—always a bride, in a snowed-in color.
For all our wisdom, you may have been a seashell, an orchid, two eyes, a faint hum. Fine.

Header photograph © Corina Orphanou.