Turning to fiction : poems / Donna Masini

A sign -- Two grapefruits -- Three card Monte -- Natural history -- Slowly -- Summer -- This girl's mother kept her umbilical cord in a class jar on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet -- Communion -- The world gains luster as it falls apart -- Longing -- Phone sex -- What she can't say when he leans toward her and whispers begin -- Ending -- Persuasion -- Girl reading -- Chair -- Reconciliation -- The trap -- Half her story -- Writing the story -- Learning to read -- Termites -- Eleven-headed female figure -- Dickens village -- What I have left -- Waiting for the subway to St. Vincent's reading the Tibetan book of living and dying -- Blood -- Summer 2002 : blackout -- Holy saturday -- St. Augustine's dog

Turning to Fiction is about loss and reconciliation - the end of a marriage, the death of friends; the ways we hurt and lose what we love. It is about the ways we struggle to find, create, recover, and lose ourselves in fictions. Here are erotic confessions whispered over the phone, sins recounted to priests, pretend confessions told to a sister. Here are the fictions that shape young girls, and limit them, the secret desires that dampened their fingers, wrote their stories.

English