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Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 729-730



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The Glass Eater

Daniel Wideman


I wonder at your witchcraft
to unbreak riven seals,
mend fractured wax,
practice magic far beyond
common spells.

Your latest trick—a woman eating glass,
insides immune to ragged shards that
by nature should shred tissue,
tear each muscle beginning with the heart.

This illusion mimics Abraham's faith-healing:
how to sunder a bird, scatter the pieces,
then with a glancing prayer
call her back into flight.

At first I thought your intention
was to devour a mirror, to
shatter and consume
the mirror and its reflection, pluck
chords that shuck a seven-year sentence and
beat off bad luck with a song.

Glass-eating seems an egregious encore
for one who has already choked down
heel-crushed slivers of a champagne flute,
crystal and vows dashed upon a nuptial floor.

But people are not paper,
and the ink of our choices
sinks into skin and swirls—
refuses the fixative of parchment. [End Page 729]

And glass—glass is just liquid:
The glass blower's forging fire
performs a magical heist:

flame translates water,
robs fluid of its natural form
When the curtain lifts,
the magician's most-feared secret is revealed:

Not a drop is lost,
though paper and glass
may be folded or eaten,
who we are won't disappear.


 

Daniel Wideman is co-editor of Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (Penguin, 1996) and author of a book of nonfiction, Singing Sankofa (Scribners, forthcoming, 2004) and a book of poetry, The Music of Scars (Big Drum Press, 2003). His play, Going to Meet the Light, was produced at the Rites and Reason Theatre in Providence in 1994. He has served as writer-in-residence at the DuBois Pan-African Cultural Centre in Accra, Ghana, and at the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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