A Sentimental Hairpin

New poetry from National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Flower Conroy.

A galactic dollhouse of pneuma with a heart of marginalia; vegan, vaginal, craft-curios; A SENTIMENTAL HAIRPIN attempts redemption. Because "[so] much doesn't exist when one can't / remember" the voices proliferating these poems ride language bareback, powering headfirst down the rabbit hole of personal and external memory, into caverns of lyrical archive. The dead speak, as does Lady Godiva's glove. We encounter pulp-fiction and philosophical erasures; extinction; and a hurricane evacuation. We try to reconcile the realities behind a fur farm, with the coat in the closet. We grapple with the all-too-common and devastatingly senseless phenomena of men committing sexual assault resulting in femicide. We gut the deer. We tend to the mother. And we do so with eye and ear attuned the seen and unseen, the screamed and the unspoken. Here is the genie in the bottle that is the dead father's cologne. Here is a cemetery as a garden of stone. Here is a voice nakedly questioning if it is the body or the mind which is more unkind. And here is the key to hope, if you can only find the door.

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies.