Alicia Elkort’s (she/her) first book of poetry, A Map of Every Undoing, was published in 2022 by Stillhouse Press with George Mason University. Alicia’s poetry has been nominated several times for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology, and her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. She reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and works as a Life Coach, helping people find more joy ,and peace. Alicia lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where praise and clouds are part of her everyday experience.
“‘Sargasso Sea’ was written in response to the novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966), in which Rhys tells the story of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) from three different points of view. In doing so, she helps us understand that Antoinette’s madness is, in fact, a response to being severely traumatized. When I read Wide Sargasso Sea in college, my mind exploded with possibility, and it remains one of my favorite novels. While the novel ends in tragedy for Antoinette, the mad woman in the attic, I wrote this poem to capture how, in my imagination, the story ends with re-birth.”
Night reigns someone else’s country.
A professor’s lecture
now lost on the threshold of memory
and memoir. The anti-heroine
is difficult—
she haunts my thoughts—
she has been discarded in an upper room, and, by that, I don’t mean heaven.
I mean we’d have to climb one hundred steps to reach the attic.
And the author—dead before the world realized how more of us identify
with Antoinette. With her madness
turning into herself when her own language
couldn’t find footing.
Candleflame pushes the dark, only a little.
This is no perfect ending. I cry for
the woman at the window, who is myself
crazy, waiting for fire, for a glimpse at forever,
somewhere different from here.
In this revised story, I leap from the window
and dive into a deep green pool I have imagined,
a swan’s dive of beauty,
landing sleek into water, yes, a baptism
that has me walking away from ruin.
