Donna de la Perrière
The Glass Delusion

occurs as a phenomenon in the popular literature of every country
at about this time. For instance, a number of Dutch women
were persuaded they had glass buttocks
and were at great pains to avoid sitting down lest they break;
one insisted she could travel only when packed in a box of straw.

These delusions generated systems
which caused ordinary people to dread
any ordinary circumstance,
resist human embrace.

This tendency to delusion existed
to some extent in earlier periods;
in the fourteenth century,
for instance, irrational fears, such as a woman made of glass
who had iron ribs sewn into her clothing.

I myself can remember being unable
to do the most ordinary things
which tended, with the advance of modernity,
to become more or less specific:

for instance, the crime, the beggared wife,
the witnessed self annihilation.
One woman thought she was a shellfish;
another believed she was all cork, light
as air, she said, and terrified of the ceiling.

Another thought her head so heavy
that it might fall from off her shoulders, and
whenever she sought to speak, swore
she felt a darkness tightening in her throat