Seascape at 4:42 PM
A faulty horizon line guesses
which side of sun
it possesses.
The sea gives no boundaries,
but doesn’t offer itself
in any real way.
One chiseled cloud makes a metonymy
of itself. Cotton mammals lurk above,
both pure and untrue.
4:43 PM drops
its un-blessings. It’s the ugliest of day—
and most aware.
….
This poem is from the chapbook This body was never made (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/this-body-was-never-made-by-tara-propper/
This body was never made is a meditation on grief and its attendant fears surrounding the body – the body’s frailty, lineage, and legacy. Its poems paint portraits of maternal loss, of a fractured family, of nature’s eloquence, and of transcendental beauty. While This body was never made does not solve the problem of death, it embraces the “night sounds” that accompany an awareness of the body’s temporality, resolving in the chapbook’s final lines, “There is nothing in this room but shapes of us—amorphous/organs ascending and descending underneath the bed sheets.” In this collection, still-life speaks, seascapes listen, and math provides counsel, reminding us that life exists before and beyond the body.
Tara Propper has earned her MFA in poetry and PhD in English. Her poetry has appeared in the Southampton Review, Janus Unbound, Literature Today, Ekstasis Magazine, Shuili Magazine, Taj Mahal International Literary Journal, Moveable Type, Vagabond City Press, and P – Queue. Her scholarly work has been published in Composition Forum, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Resources for American Literary Study. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas at Tyler.
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