Dear Sylvia

By Nancy Dunlop

Dear Sylvia,
For years your poems
seeped through me
until I finally gave in and allowed myself to be yours
But now, after my own
life cracked down the middle
landing me in the hospital
I must part ways with you
I don't want your ringing anthems
about doll girls and nurses and coffin lids.
I mean, really!
you modelled your poems
to fit with your grisly prediction
yours was a poetics of quick death.

So, dear Sylvia, I divest myself of you
despite your tricky eloquence,
your beautiful horrors.

I am turning my compass,
hopping poem to poem
out of the darkness
to newly lit light.

Nancy Dunlop is a poet and a writer who lives in Delmar, N.Y. with her husband and two cats. It was published first in Miss Stein's Drawing Room.https://www.facebook.com/nancy.dunlop1?fref=nf