Featured Poet: Meg Peterson, Plymouth
Meg Petersen is the director of the Plymouth Writing Project and a
founding editor of the Plymouth Writers Group Anthologies of Teachers Writing. Her poetry has appeared in Concrete Wolf, Entelechy International: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, Garden Lane, English Journal, The Leaflet, The International Journal for Teaching Writing, the Plymouth Writers Group Anthologies, and other publications. In 1997, she was named New England Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English. Recently her poem, "Bringing Down the Ceiling" was featured in a poetry month display at the New Hope Gallery in Bristol, Rhode Island. Her work appears in the new anthology Regrets Only from Little Pear Press.
Of her featured poem, Meg writes:
This poem came out of the quite literal experience of having to take
down a horsehair plaster ceiling. I had a lot of time to hone the
images as I worked at it over the course of a weekend. I thought about a story my friend Robert Miller wrote in which he used a falling ceiling as a "metaphor too perfect to name". The last line emerged in revision, surprising me with how it made me rethink the whole experience.
Bringing Down the Ceiling
Seek out the shadowed slits into which
the metal blade might fit.
Find the point of pressure
and steady yourself.
Exploit the hidden fault lines
in the plaster.
Brace your weight and push-
not strong, but cautious,
as if to pump brakes on glare ice.
Expose yet another row
of bare wooden slats.
Try not to breathe
until the dust settles.
Remember how we go about our lives
believing the ceiling, the walls, the frames
will hold
And as the pieces crack and plummet,
as the heavy horsehair plaster falls,
splits and drops like strange rain,
lands with a thud you will hear
in your dreams,
remember all those times the metaphor
arrived too perfect to name, too whole
to swallow, and wonder
if you can ever know you love anything again
until you have split apart its seams.
(first published in Concrete Wolf)
For more information about Meg Petersen visit...
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