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Voice Practice

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2019

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An adaptation of Conversation Among the Ruins, by Sylvia Plath, which poem I once read aloud, several times each day for several days, while practicing my voice.

 

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a harsher flight how the entrance settles

as ash on a tongue drier than mine:

all ‘throughs’ are weirder, now, in the new

order of ruins and fallen lights and

untasteable turns of the frames we sat beneath,

bleak as the miles still to cover (rise,

terminal, rise) from shellac’s, the hell of sensory’s,

record setting crash through the wall

of our home – to home, at last – while storms

take off low, hacking bitter light down

the forbidden estates of this neck, whispering –

this is not a safe place for us to speak –

of tunnels, fissures in the crust, ways to get back

that kingdom behind the eye, whence

our high, magic ceremony of lashes, that rending slip

to once more draw the havoc forth

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