Megan Grumbling
POETRY-June 2012
Poem by Megan Grumbling
Edited by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
Artwork by Sam Guay
“Purge”
in the Bethel sauna
Supine and stripped, we’re bent in crooked thrall
to yellow pine’s rash blaze and roar. Sludge seeps
from us logged beasts, our permeable faults
and pores engorged with gunk. And so Nance scrapes
with wooden blades, confides how mortified
she’d been in Turkish hamams, with her mess
of rampant nether hair, bowing to strikes
from toothless matrons, dark pendulous breasts
to waists, and how she oozed, and how it reeks,
how vile, how badly you want to excuse
yourself—because it’s you fouling the steam,
your grime they breathe. Such sublime abuse,
the body’s humbling, such relief. We well,
knowing ourselves porous, absolvable.
Untitled, 2012, sumi ink, digital, 5″ x 5″
Maine magazine works in conjunction with students at the Maine College of Art. Illustration major Sam Guay says of “Purge”: “The textures of churning, gritty mud come to mind, and at the end of the poem, the mud is washed away.”
Megan Grumbling on “Purge”: “Sweating in a dark sauna in the middle of the woods, a friend and I talked about bodies, the filth they can’t escape collecting, and finally the catharsis of being—however briefly—clean. Our musings found their way into this sonnet.”