Gleeful Rejection of Object Permanence - Olivia Pierce

Olivia Pierce is the 4th place prize winner of the Spring 2021 Sad Girls Club Poetry Contest

Of the boarding process and its reliably plastic smell. Give me stilted interactions with the nameless hundreds, in droves, arriving—their looming luggage enigmatic and impersonal. Stock photo public people, never seen asleep in front of the television. Never carefully peeling an orange. I’m in my window seat, trying to picture it. Above the gossamer clouds, they are with me. Sitting up straight, facing forward; when I leave here, they’ll be nothing. Floating fabric on invisible bones, disembodied voices upstaged by the turbine. Coveted anonymity. An absence to be replenished. How perfect they are. How I’d never want to know them.

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Olivia Pierce is a second-year MFA Poetry student at The New School in New York City. She was recently awarded the second-place recipient of the Paul Violi Poetry Prize.