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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Synecdoche

By Sophie Panzer

They say the painter Van Gogh

cut off his ear in a fit of tortured

 

madness and presented it to a prostitute

he might have loved, as if to say,

 

take this, make of me what you will,

derive my essence from this fragment

 

of flesh. Again and again we see

the blurred divide between madness

 

and genius. Think: what if, rather than

relying on endless testing and paperwork

 

colleges asked applicants for a single sliver

of belly or buttock or breast

 

mailed overnight in a cooler

and then, along with thousands

 

of others, fed through

a machine that could distill from it

 

every drip of ambition

every particle of desire

 

every tremor of weakness

as if the number of times you decided

 

to watch Netflix and eat ice cream

rather than study for AP Calculus

 

was configured deep in your tissues, mapped

in the intricate alignment of your cells.

 

 

Sophie Panzer is a history major at McGill University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in carte blanche, GERM Magazine, Inklette, The Veg, Yiara, Teen Ink, and YARN (Young Adult Review Network). She enjoys musicals, long hikes, and friendly arguments.

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Issue Five

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