My mind tries to remember what movies it created as I slept. The same mind that gave, snatches away—a hand feeding, not feeding—like nothing else in this world. My mind is asleep in a cavern. A cellar with an old wooden ladder. The wood rots and splits underfoot. No, my mind is not the cellar, but the ladder. It gives escape or entry but when taken away I’m trapped, either on the roof or in an unlit underground. The dream is an art (act?) that, once created, remains frightful. A monster no one saw coming. You have to leave it alone in the woods to die. Giving succor would plant vines too hard to eliminate: poison, defy, defile. In the dream, chanting men told me what they’d do to me. I woke up trying to breathe under the covers. Hearing voices.

*From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000): “I want to talk about getting the bus home, and my walk down from Weston road, and what I talked about to myself on the way to this room, this chair, this instant (which is gone, even as my pen scratches the first ‘i’)...”

Jessica Purdy

holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Spiritual Literature; and has appeared in About Place, Action, The Ekphrastic Review, Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, Litro, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Night Heron Barks, ONE ART, Radar, Spectacle, and numerous others. She is the author of STARLAND (Nixes Mate Books, 2017) and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate Books, 2018), the latter of which was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry.

She is also author of the chapbooks You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), poems based on dollhouse-scale dioramas by forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee, which were collected in Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and used to train homicide investigators. The Adorable Knife won the New Hampshire Writer’s Project People’s Choice Award in 2025.

Purdy lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, and teaches at SNHU. For a list of other publications, plus a portfolio excerpted from The Adorable Knife and published by Buttonhook Press in 2022, Murder in the House: The “Nutshells” of Frances Glessner Lee, visit the author’s website:

https://www.jessicapurdy.com