Stability Is a Feeling
a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I am doing nothing with my exile
of a life.
I go to the supermarket Saturday
on walks in the wilderness
of America on Sunday. I get thin.
I encourage the man I married
to work hard
at a career I don’t admire.
He is not sweet or funny.
He is as steady and strong as death.
I find myself horrified
of the future; the woman I want to be
is implausible. Voicing
my tender ideas is not possible.
The book of poems inside me
is desperate for morning.
Copyright © 2023 by Nazifa Islam. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 12, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Stability Is a Feeling’ is part of a series of Sylvia Plath found poems focused on the bipolar experience. I select a paragraph from a Plath text—in this case, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath—and only use the words from that paragraph to create a poem. I essentially write a poem while doing a word search using Sylvia Plath as source material. I don’t allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language for tense or any other consideration. These poems are simultaneously defined by both Plath’s choices with language and my own.”
—Nazifa Islam
Nazifa Islam
Nazifa Islam is the author of Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems (Shearsman Books, 2021) and Searching for a Pulse (Whitepoint Press, 2013). She lives in Novi, Michigan.