Glass Houses
Photo by moniek van rosse on Unsplash
03.29.26| Vol. 57, No. 6 | Poetry
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I built
a greenhouse              around
myself
to wander a world
I curated with
n b
i    o
a       w
r            s,
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w
a
      t
         e
     r
     f
       a
          l
          l
           s, and waveless
   pools.
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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.
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They may be right.
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I may be mistaken.
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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.

