Poem of the Week | August 24, 2015

This week we feature a new poem by Shamala Gallagher. Gallagher’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, VOLT, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and the author of a chapbook, I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke (dancing girl press). She has worked as a case manager for homeless families in San Francisco and for HIV+ individuals in Austin, and she holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
 
Author’s note:

This is a slanted/blurred vision of a summer in my life. There is a weighted dark beneath this poem, at least in my own understanding of it. I hope you can tell. Sometimes I am interested in confession, but it’s not that I think my own experiences carry particular significance. I like confession’s aesthetic thrill: its flicker of the sublime couched in the glittering and intricate grammars of allusiveness.