Skip to content
    • Subscriptions
    • Subscribe and Support
    • Digital Subscription Access - Account
    • Digital Subscription Access - password
    • Submissions
    • Feedback and Critique
    • Guidelines
    • Read or Listen
    • Read Excerpts
    • Listen on SoundCloud
    • Browse Issues
  • Transparency in Publishing
    • About Us
    • About TLR
    • Masthead
    • What We Pay (and how we do it)
    • Contact
    • Cover Art
Tahoma Literary Review is committed to supporting equity in the literary arts. Learn more here.
Tahoma Literary Review
  • Subscriptions expand
    • Subscribe and Support
    • Digital Subscription Access - Account
    • Digital Subscription Access - password
  • Submissions expand
    • Feedback and Critique
    • Guidelines
  • Read or Listen expand
    • Read Excerpts
    • Listen on SoundCloud
    • Browse Issues
  • Transparency in Publishing
  • About Us expand
    • About TLR
    • Masthead
    • What We Pay (and how we do it)
    • Contact
    • Cover Art
Cart Cart

From Issue 15: "Gravity Haunted" (Poetry)

September 16, 2019

Gravity Haunted

 

M. Soledad Caballero

 

Reading time: approximately 3 minutes

 

"Gravity Haunted" originally appeared in Issue 15 of Tahoma Literary Review.  For me, what poet M. Soledad Caballero has accomplished in this prose sonnet form is a pensive reflection of interior travel. Through time, space, memory, and emotion, from ancient myth to modern experience, I was surprised and thrilled by the journey in this work. I hope you will be as well.

We'd love to know what you think of it. Let us know by posting over at our Facebook page, or reaching out to us on Twitter. And as always, thanks for reading!

Mare Heron Hake

Poetry Editor

___

 

Before any flight our hearts beat hot, a furnace of red, blazing.

This, too, is prayer against the engines of the plane, against the

madness of a gravity that wins against reason and lifts the plane

while I close my eyes in wonder, petrified at the truth of science

and its tentacles. Beloved, we have lived this dance together for two

decades. You still tell me stories of Odysseus and his shipwrecked heart.

The way the gods always punish and also reward the traveler.

You whisper to me about battles of water and blood and half imagined

dreams, when whole ships plunged into the mouth of the ocean, when

Poseidon flung them across the dark mirror of the sea. Yes, you try, offer

me the stories of other bodies and other scars, as if they are a wish. But

when I think of flying, I imagine Penelope who knew travel cost her

all the love she had, all the men the Cyclops ate. And I remember

I have danced with gravity since I was a girl fleeing a dark, slender country.

 

***

reprinted with the permission of the poet

M. Soledad Caballero had this to say about "Gravity Haunted":

This poem is one of fifteen prose sonnets I am working on about my fear of flying. For me, flying is emotionally draining, and it feels simultaneously unnatural and supernatural. Even though I was only a child, I still vividly remember the flight from Chile to Oklahoma, the flight of my immigration to the US. Recently, my husband and I have been rereading the Odyssey together; bodies traveling in that world are at risk and in danger and pain all the time. Traveling in this poem is brutal. This poem emerged out of this rereading and my anxieties.

 M. Soledad Caballero, Professor of English at Allegheny College, is a scholar and poet whose work focuses on British Romanticism, Interdisciplinarity, the Cognitive Humanities, and Poetry.

 

 

 

Share Share on Facebook Tweet Tweet on Twitter Pin it Pin on Pinterest
Back to Excerpts

Invalid password
Enter
  • Search
  • Contact Us
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • RSS
© 2021, Tahoma Literary Review Powered by Shopify