Glass Houses

I built a greenhouse around myself to wander a world
Maeve Slattery | Contributor

03.29.26
| Vol. 57, No. 6 | Poetry

 

I built

a greenhouse                           around

myself

to wander a world

I curated with

n  b

i        o

a              w

r                        s,

 

w

a

      t

         e

      r

      f

        a

           l

           l

            s, and waveless

   pools.

 

Although battles wage beyond

glass walls claiming I am

bro/ken,

I move gracefully,

emPOWERed,

knowing I am now

more truly mySELF than I

ever     have        been.

 

They may be right.

 

I may be mistaken.

 

But their world is full of

shadows.

And I would rather

stay

where the butterflies

sing.

Maeve Slattery

Maeve is a fourth year honours psychology student at VIU where she is a lab coordinator for the Fear & Anxiety Research Lab and a peer-support learning leader. Off-campus, she works as an inclusive education teacher and volunteers at the Nanaimo Brain Injury Society. Prior to attending VIU, she published Celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas (a children’s daily activity book), a stand-alone novel Grafted Together based on her experiences in Zimbabwe, as well as Guarding Damiana, the first book of a YA trilogy that desperately went on hold after she started taking psychology courses. Other projects in the vault include a children’s picture book series and a young reader’s novel series. She is planning to attend graduate studies in clinical psychology, so it looks like those writing projects will be staying in the vault for another 6 years. In the meantime, she continues to write poems, songs, and statistical analyses for research projects.

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