Creature

“How many times have I sensed myself / as though behind glass, my isolation / excluding others, and always, / it seemed, the real world just beyond?” The speaker of the title poem of Marsha de la O’s Creature is face to face with a Cooper’s hawk that has flown in through her window and is now “trapped / in a paroxysm of fear.” By the poem’s end, the speaker, in conversation with her therapist, understands that it is she who wants to be free.

This collection is built on shapeshifting turns, from the realization that “I am no longer a beast,” to the sense that “I am granite, / flint, myself the mortar and fiery pestle, rocky plates / scraping themselves away. I wear adamant like a cloak.” In “The Boy Who Went Looking,” the speaker transforms from wind to hawk to girl to shell, while searching for his mother:

I was hidden in a white man’s pocket.
At the river, I became a pole bridge,
a rope, I was hand-over-hand. Once
I saw a ball of light moving slowly down
the track. I ran, but could not reach her.

“The Day I Was Protected” turns from persona to the personal, with a traumatic recollection from childhood: “I am the harsh sound a tool makes, a small cutting wheel scoring a surface, scribing a line.” The speaker observes her father, a glazier:

angry but careful, he taps along the line he’s made 
and breaks the glass with his hands, moving quickly, he
doesn’t wear gloves. He picks up the cutter to score the next piece.
Have you ever felt a hive mind, a swarm in light that falls slant, a presence?

The act of protection referred to is revealed: a man purchases a lantern, then offers $100 for the little girl. 

In “To Be Unprotected,” the speaker turns to her own tool, language:

Inside my body, a hum or tremble
in a place where I keep fear,
outside, a glister, a lilt, falling
as sound from stars
like tin, like salt, like silt. Words
can’t mean the same thing twice.