Your Thinking Putty— | Savannah Harris

Savannah Harris Your Thinking Putty—

The Winner of the 2020 Lucy Monro Brooker Poetry Award

It’s intrusive when You find a stranger’s partial crammed in the side of a sphere You’d worked so hard to mold.

You craft it just right, just round enough, set it down / think it is finished & then

oh God—

there’s something never-perfect about them, each one You craft, with little regard to the last one You’ve mashed for not being good enough between Your goddess fingers & when You return to rectify the lumped form, Your makeshift earth, thickets of swooping greens wrapped about themselves in an obscured Eden— like all edens closed for repairs / each equally flawed— a new snake, slicked in the venom of a danger-promise, appears like clockwork— each adam sent in rescue only bows at the sight of Your sparse cuppings of foliage

& falls for apple tricks until You become bored, Your fury burning new paths through vines / scorch marks marring a man-god’s design in a man-god’s world for men who think themselves gods.

oh God, Jesus, Adam, Satan himself—

Who fucked it up this time?

One evening, I could not for the life of me muster inspiration. A friend passed over a container of Thinking Putty, and as I instinctively rolled a ball of it , the speaker of this poem leapt from within me, and so I wrote her story—how she feels about the men in her life, religion, and the world. It came together before I really realized what I had, which I believe is a very relevant take on some timeless concerns regarding the human condition.