A queer, interpretive response to Plath’s famous piece – By Ely Percy
Photography by Elijah O’ Donnell, via Unsplash
Content Warning: mentions of suicidal thoughts
I shut my eyes and wish that I’ll drop dead;
I hear your cries and hope is spawned again.
(I cannot get your words out of my head).
My world ignites as I sit on your bed
Despite the swell of darkness in my brain.
I shut my eyes and wish that I’ll drop dead.
Entranced by all things bolshy, bold and bad:
Your pouting lips, hard eyes and fierce refrain.
(I cannot get your words out of my head).
When they say you are ‘poison’ I see red
And chase my tail around the room in vain.
I shut my eyes and wish that I’ll drop dead.
I gallop down a path where devils tread
Then follow you to hell and back again.
(I cannot get your words out of my head).
And in the end, your letters go unread;
I swear I’ll never look at you again.
I shut my eyes and wish that I’ll drop dead;
(I cannot get your words out of my head).
Ely Percy
Ely Percy is a Scottish fiction writer, a memoirist and an epistolarian. Their first work ‘Cracked: Recovering From Traumatic Brain Injury’ (JKP, 2002) took the form of both a creative and an academic text; they graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s Mphil in Creative Writing in 2004, and since then their work has appeared in many reputable literary journals (e.g. The Edinburgh Review, The Scotsman Orange, New Writing Scotland, Causeway). Over the last fifteen years, Percy has facilitated countless writing workshops for various minority groups; they’ve been writer-in-residence in a prison, they’ve edited a lesbian publication, they’ve worked as a community librarian in an LGBT centre. They are currently writing a neo-queer-noir novel.
