Maybe a short, short story.
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I originally wanted to write an erasure poem from Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin, but I couldn't write it well enough to my liking; I couldn't portray the story I wanted to by only including a handful of words. So instead, this is a really long erasure? I'm sure you're not supposed to used whole fragments from the story the whole way through, but as I was taught this semester... "rules were meant to be broken" Hallelujah
Had fallen in love with her
Since
He could give her one of the oldest and proudest names in Louisiana
[Her] face became suffused with a glow that was happiness itself
It is a boy, to bear his name;
Oh, mamma, I'm so happy; it frightens me
She asked no greater blessing of God.
Conviction that there was something menacing her peace.
He absented himself from home;
Avoided her presence and that of her child, without excuse
Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him
[She] was miserable enough to die
In a voice that must have stabbed him, if he was human
He coldly but gently loosened her fingers from about his arm and thrust the hand away
-That child is not white; it means you are not white
She laughed hysterically
-Shall I go?
-Yes, go
-Do you want me to go?
-Yes, I want you to go
He no longer loved her, because of the
unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name
She walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her
She disappeared among the reeds and willows that grew thick
In the centre of a smoothly swept back yard was a great bonfire
[He] sat in the wide hallway that commanded a view of the spectacle
The last thing to go was a tiny bundle of letters;
It was not Desiree's it was part of an old letter from his mother to his father
He read it
-I thank the good God for having arranged our lives so that our dear [boy] will never know
that his mother, who adores him,
belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery
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This is Desiree's Baby without all of the fillers. The raw plot of the story (in my opinion). This brings me back to one of my classmates comments; she said something along the lines of it being easier for her to understand things through poetry. At the time I was like dammmn, no way, that'd be too difficult for me. But hey, if a poem were written like this ^ it would be easy, that is if you were only reading for the plot.
