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The Heresy of Silence
By Stacia M. Fleegal


The demands of Truth are severe…Unless incidentally, [Poetry] has no concern whatever with Truth or Duty…The true artist will always contrive to tone them down. 
                                                          –Edgar Allan Poe, from The Heresy of the Didactic

 

Poe would’ve burned me at the stake.

He would’ve locked me in an elegy—

that pendulum between life and death—

for suggesting truth is relative

and as much itself as lies.  Disguises

in poems?  Hard-rhyming love is

anything but cool, calm, unimpassioned.

I was already a teacher at six

the moment his poems bit my hands; still,

I’ve only ever sat in classrooms. 

Some alchemy makes pens didactic here,

between flexors and abductors.  I may

stutter: Poe—poets

die, bindings crack out loud,

but even flame enunciates.

 

 

 

Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (WordTech, forthcoming 2010) and the chapbooks The Lines Are Not My Friends (second place, Cervená Barva Press chapbook competition, forthcoming 2009) and A Fling with the Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Individual poems are forthcoming in Fourth River, Skidrow Penthouse, Blue Collar Review, The Kerf, Pemmican, and Babel Fruit, and have appeared most recently in Inkwell, New Verse News, Dos Passos Review, and Protest Poems. She received her MFA in writing from Spalding University and is co-founder and managing editor of Blood Lotus (www.bloodlotus.org).

 

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