I could sense their coveted power from my mother’s daily devotions to her thin straight hair, the pink foam curlers she’d clip tight with white pins until she looked less herself, and more like an awkward flower, her green robe like a stem. Was this when I began to feel her envy’s invisible rain fall in every room? My head was covered in curls. I could slip a restless fingertip into one of their magic tunnels or straighten a stray ringlet like the corkscrew cord on a telephone. Scientists believe curls grew from our early hominid heads and cooled the scalp so the prehistoric brain could enlarge to human size. To this day, I am swept through with an electric charge after a shower as I stand before the mirror in the wash of their waves, the ghost of my mother’s envy still rising from the tiled floor in spirals of steam.
Hate bras? This is the bra for you. I can’t gatekeep. I hadn’t worn a bra in years but this changed me. Are you a member of the Itty Bitty Titty Club (IBTC)? Well it’s here finally, a bra made for small cups. No more gapping. I threw all my old bras in the trash when I tried this on. I just ordered four more. Have you been wearing the wrong size since you were ten and your mother wrapped you up with her measuring tape, told you to stand still, straight? We’ll tell you your True Size. Take this quick quiz and give us your email. We’ll send you emails till you buy a bra from us or die. What do you mean you want to unsubscribe? This is our best offer, only one time. I used to believe wireless bras couldn’t work for big boobs like mine. That was until I tried—I can’t gatekeep. This one is for my girls who are blessed in the chest. This year we’re kicking underwire to the curb. This year we’re breaking up with cup spillage. This year we’re saying no to uniboob and constant pain. Listen, you need to see this for yourself. My bestie asked if I’d gotten a boob job. I’ve never had cleavage before this bra. This bra is magic. Watch how it disappears under my tee. Watch how it makes my back fat disappear. Does your size fluctuate throughout your cycle? Girl, mine too. Girl, this one is for you. Stop what you’re doing now and listen up. These straps won’t slip or dig into your skin branding you with crimson marks that take forever to fade. So easy to adjust! This is the very bra Taylor Swift wore rehearsing for the Eras Tour. It improves your posture and your mental health. I can’t gatekeep. I quit therapy after wearing this for a day. My boyfriend asked if I’d started a new anti-depressant. Ladies, this is not a normal bra. It feels like I’m wearing a cloud. It feels like I’m floating on an innertube with my bestie back when we were still too young for bras. I fall asleep in it. Work out in it. I’ve updated my will to request they bury me in it. Because this is heaven: no more gapping, no uniboob, no endless, lonely ache so subtle you stop noticing it till it’s gone. These pads can be removed for customized cleavage. This is my new “have to leave the house” bra. This is my new “have to turn the Zoom camera on” bra. This is my new “have to drag myself from bed although what’s the point really” bra. Its band never rides up. My ride-or-die. You’ll wear it the store. Wear it to work. The gym. To make dinner, to load the dishwasher. To Swiffer the floor and vacuum the rug, scroll through a feed of wedding anniversaries and new babies, cocktails on beaches, the friends you meant to keep up with and men you once turned down looking happy, check Facebook Memories. Girl, you can stop scrolling. I can’t gatekeep: this is the first bra I don’t take off as soon I get home. This is it for me. This is the support I’ve been needing. Oh my God, this changes everything.
By Hannah Smith Featured Art: “1000 Miles From Nowhere” by Mallory Stowe
You can say a prairie fits into a plain, but not the other way around. Like a square and a rectangle, I’ve been looking for boundaries, sharp corners
I might tuck myself into. The plain is both a noun and an adjective, a landscape and a modifier to mean common. I’ve been called a common woman: a forgetful blonde girl
in a bluebonnet pasture who must’ve been asking for it. An ask can also be a prayer, with the added expectation of an answer. If I can fit myself into small spaces,
on a molecular level, I might see my compounds in soil chemistry. Wildflower is synonymous with weed, and that’s an issue with differing opinions of beauty. Weeds restore
over-exposed soils, fertilize degraded spreads. You can’t construct a new ecosystem, but you can repair one that’s breaking. I’m building another bionetwork that’s anything
but ordinary. Some day soon, I’ll find myself in a prairie patch along the floodplains. A sewing needle in hand, and a bucket of rain-ripe compost.
sharpen knives with their teeth, adjust their shawls to hide their tails and make tiny feather quilts to keep the birds warm. They char quail eggs with their breath, serve them on bone China with sucking candies, then ask if you’re certain you turned the stove off before you left the house Their closets are filled with carpets and spice, bolts of silk and roast chicken. Their medicine chests are stuffed with opium, hemlock and baby aspirin In response to most questions they say— Turn it, turn it, for all is in it, and for this it is said their price is far above pearls
At the all-girls school they taught us don’t fight back: the rapist might get mad.
Against my will, I remember this
when I need to takea walk to clear my head. When I fear the sound of feet, a distance
closing. When I drop my eyes in passing,
my neck for decades bending. On the train a man asks me what I’m reading. Show me
the Great American Writer; I’ll show you
a man who finds by walking out alone what freedomis,
and, so, America, I want to be
the kind of woman who walks into night, a fine rain, her own thoughts.
If at dusk I hear a clutch of cries
and rush of wings from powerlines. If I love a spread of stars, dark wind in trees.
If walking is a bodied way of thinking.
If I love a subway map, a screech of trains. If walking out and back intact is luck.
If I have been a long time without thinking.
If I wanted to go there by myself
thinking. If I just wanted to go somewhere.
Quoted phrases and lines are from Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”; Judy Grahn, “A Woman Is Talking to Death”; Kim Moore, “On the train a man asks me what I’m reading”; June Jordan, “Power”; Lisa Shen, “Sixteen Seconds”
Before the suck and stutter of the first breath, even before the first cells hook up for an amniotic float in if not primordial bliss then something just this side of it, there was the want, the desire that begat the pre-child then stuck in a world impossible to remember, impossible not to feel sorrow mixed with joy over my newborn’s eviction from her Eden, her tenderest of faultless flesh now to know the endless hunger, the deep cold of alone, the body a riot of wants, wants unto the last gasp of my mother’s four-foot-nine-inch fierce frame, every inch railing railing against the bait-and-switch trickster’s scythe, her only wish the hunger for more days, more life, and so someone from hospice calls me to come get this inconvenient, angry woman who will not go gentle into that good night.
Excerpts from The Extant Works of Aretaeus The Cappadocian, translated by Francis Adams (1856), A Brief Discovery of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) by Edward Jorden
In the middle flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither. In a word, it is altogether erratic.
You made an aquarium of my insides. Sculpted salty marshlands out of meaty pulp. Fashioned algae nests from fleshy sinew, white & crooked as the half-moons of fingernails.
You napped in the hollows of my ribcage. Nestled your mighty body into hammocks of irish moss. Smacked on sugar kelp like pink chewing gum, sapped & sweet as the raw nerves under cracked teeth.
In fragrant smells it also delights and advances toward them. To fetid smells, it has an aversion, and flees from them. On the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.
From deep inside me you now roar. Crying and howling until my whole belly sometimes lifts.
When, therefore, it is suddenly carried upwards, and remains above for a considerable time, violently compressing the intestines, the woman experiences choking.
My organs; an oblation to you.
For the liver, diaphragm, and lungs are quickly squeezed within a narrow space; and therefore loss of breathing and speech seems to be present.
With teeth clamped shut, our hearts convulse in chorus.
This suffocation from the womb accompanies females alone.
Men stuff partridge feathers and hot coals inside my nostrils. Prod blisters on my breasts—blindly, as newborn kits search for milk.
Those from the uterus are remedied by fetid smells, and the application of fragrant things. A pessary induces abortion and a powerful congelation of the womb.
From me you surface burnt and hemorrhaging on sorrow. Like that of slaughtered swine.
Grief comes with sponge and pail. Scours my soul—barren, we laugh ourselves to sleep.
I am reading my book manuscript to my mother in her backyard. She tells me that was probably a catbird I saw earlier. She tells me bleach is the real way to get stains out of grout. The narrative urge is a strong one, she says. She had an invisible horse, but never said she wanted to be one. On that last point, we disagree. Perhaps it was only a feeling I had when we were watching horses in a field. That blurring of beings. Like the colors in a Vuillard painting. A dress turning into a table or an orchard. My college painting teacher said edges are important, but never explained how best to create them. I wanted us to be old ladies together, I say to my mother, meaning me and her. Now we know it isn’t going to happen. But she says she was dreading it—she didn’t want to be here to see me grow old. We decide death comes too soon, in the second section of my manuscript— And speaking of death, how can the deck chair cushions still have a cat hair side, I ask her, now that the cats have been dead for years. Because we’re disgusting old people, she replies with a laugh, meaning herself and my stepfather. Though the truth is I’m the sloppy one. This redbud tree is a new redbud tree and I didn’t even notice. I didn’t notice the new flowers she potted either, lined up with their brilliant blossoms, waiting to be put on the front porch. It’s all one to me: the backyard, the flowers, my mother, me. How can any of it exist without the rest? We agree that I’ve written too many poems, and they don’t go together.
In the photograph my mother is ten; she poses in a ruffled dress and hand-me-down coat that swallows her arms the way shame swallows people whole.
Lost in the oversize. Standing near a clapboard porch. She knows she is poor, one of the poorest; her shoes are too tight. Other children tease her about the key around her neck.
My mother makes drawings of what she can’t buy; it will take years, and thousands of dollars, for her to learn that money does not make her happy.
In the photo, my mother smiles upward like the glamorous people in magazines. She tapes sketches of stars to her wall, studies them before she falls asleep.
II.
My grandmother sews clothes for my mother; she doesn’t need patterns, she has learned to make things on her own from what her mind can see. My grandmother is a bank teller, on her feet all day; tellers are not allowed to sit. Only night belongs to her. My mother hears the machine, an animal that growls in the dark.
III.
My mother’s walls are rich in the way my daughter’s walls will be, covered in desire. My daughter will labor over vision boards, collage pictures of people and places to help dreams come true, what vision boards can do.
My daughter will stack magazines by her bed, take scissors to girls playing sports with those beautiful bodies, magnificent boys with interested eyes. Picnics – dances – all the weddings – cut out –
IV.
Sometimes, awake with my own futility, what I can’t do for my child, I will picture the grandmother I never knew, bent over small light, laboring. How many hours to stitch ruffles?
V.
Standing, my mother crosses her legs, an awkward pose, perhaps one she has seen in a star. Balanced forever. Pinned to a wall.
White girl with the slender legs, I’ve been measuring myself by those yardsticks, trying to fit into the cocoon of your skinny jeans and make this butt a butterfly. White girl with the limpy locks—
angel hair—I’m running behind you on the track, watching your ponytail, a pendulum, swing back and forth and back again. I bet even the hair in between your thighs is smooth as thread, your knuckle frizz
a fine, fine filament. You fair thing! The way you stop to stretch, raising your arms without thinking, bending back without looking to see who’s behind you. O how I want you and hate you.
Or want to hate you. Or hate to want you. Butter-skinned beauty, I could swallow you whole and alive.
So they give you these special shirts: easy-open fronts. Post procedure they herd you into this room where others in the same boat and shirt must sit and wait. I walk in say Oh how embarrassing we’re all wearing thesame top to no response. The TV’s tuned to daytime talk, nobody watching. I offer to change the channel or turn it off. No takers. A few seconds later: “Up next! How one woman got the news that would change her life forever: ‘I found out I had breast cancer!’” Then someone says Yeah no we’re shutting that off and gets up and does the deed. A minute later this same woman gets her results. And they were good. Very good. They were perfect. And she jumped, whooped, pumped her fists said Praise Sweet Jesus and her boobs popped right out of that special shirt
By J.C. Talamantez Featured art: maternal memories, 2019 by Emma Stefanoff
When you were a girl, you thought about what kind of woman you would be
how you would differ from her / her life in hardening hands the work, an early marriage then the angry one her suspect taste in men that she hung on when there was nothing left to hang kept laboring the labor the men wouldn’t do
It was a long time to undo / the belief that to be a woman is partial a life of shadows joining
and sometimes i still feel like a dog always checking its masters eyes
You wanted / to be a woman this is what it is sometimes
Because of her own curiosity she said yes when he asked her to put the bit on him. The bit, or gag, was an iron mask shaped like half a moon with a hook that went around the front of a person’s head. A spiked collar connected to the mask through a lock at the back of the neck.
He collected historical artifacts like these, the iron bit and scold’s bridle women were once punished with wearing, the shackles and chains forced upon slaves, items all from a not-too-distant era. When she asked him why, he told her he had a fascination for history long forgotten.
“Forgotten?” she asked and he shrugged in response.
She was used to men wanting things like this from her, to be blindfolded with her wrists cuffed and legs tied. She’d been expecting a day to come when he’d ask her if she would wear the bit, because hadn’t their relationship been leading up to this? Men, both white and black alike, were always asking in various ways to put her in this position, one of servitude, of serving. They wanted her on her back with her legs spread, body motionless, a mouth open only for moaning or what he’d force in. So many of them held this secret desire within themselves but eventually, with time, they always found a way to tell her.
She picked the bit up. As she felt its weight, she imagined what her fore-bearers must have experienced as the iron was fastened on. “Where did you get this?”
“eBay,” he said. The simplicity of his answer made her laugh. She asked him if it was real.
“I think so. Go ahead. Put it on,” he urged, and she did.
I shudder when I think of the giant beavers— tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs— they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm, they infested ponds and rivers, smothered gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine, they slapped their murderous tails—bleating, they dragged themselves up the riverbank, spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies, the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care— hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies— they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts? They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces, their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—
Our parson to the old women’s faces That are cold and folded, like plucked dead hens’ arses. —Ted Hughes
An old woman thought her face was a dead hen’s arse. Maybe it was all the years of plucking and waxing. The woman had no idea what would make her think her face was a dead hen’s arse and not a live hen’s arse, and why the arse and not the beak, but she did. It couldn’t be my age, the woman thought.
It couldn’t be the men, not when everyone knows men love older women, especially much older, especially with all the grandma porn, all the old women sex costumes, all the men who ogle elderly women in walkers. She had read so many books where men longed for older women, where old women seduced helpless wide-eyed men. She saw billboards where old women modeled teenage clothing, modeled Brazilian bathing suit bottoms. And she knew the trend: folding wrinkles into one’s face using a Dumpling Dough Press.
People would stop her and take selfies. You look like a movie star, they’d say. They wouldn’t leave her alone. She’d shrug. Maybe it was the way she’d sometimes cluck when she made love to her husband? This could be the reason he’d whisper, One day I may trade you in for an older model. Or maybe it was all the eggs she ate. Or her penchant for feathers. Or how her mother used to call her my little chickadee. The woman was unsure why she thought her face was a dead fowl’s feces-extruding cloaca. She only knew she was tired of seeing twenty-year-old men with women who could be their grandmothers, old women who treated the men like so many dimpled birds.
Why had I not noticed them before? The women in treatment on every block, it seems, leaving the library, walking their dogs. Once they hid themselves beneath wigs, fashionable hats in the city, or entered softly in Birkenstocks and baseball caps, stayed out of the way. Now they show up, unannounced. In offices, in waiting rooms, in aisle seats with legs outstretched, the women in treatment flip the pages, reach the end, bald, emboldened. One outside a florist today arranges lantana in time for evening rush. A bright silk scarf around her pale round head calls attention to her Supermoon. And one woman my own age, in my own town, takes up a table right in front. She nurses a chai latte in a purple jacket, her hair making its gentle comeback. What she pens in a small leather notebook: a grocery list? Ode to her half-finished French toast? The kind of poem living people write.
A paperweight of sorts. A shiny genetic clip for the stack of notes she’s become on carbon dating, lozenges, and “getting over it.”
On a park bench she could lean over to the other stunned, unmade-up mothers who stare like cruelly unfinished paintings. She could say, we are the giant price tags that once hung off them.
A penny to toss in the well. Mindlessness held together by bones. Something that happened once in the distance, like a war or an arctic expedition.
A list of ways she would try not to feel about a son or a daughter. A list of choking hazards and a list of times she will have peeled back the curtain for him or her by age seven. A list of golf courses and shades of blue.
Her penmanship begins to pile up and look like sticks, like an attempt at a tiny fire left on a stone.
The door’s made of gingerbread that the rats have eaten through. You finger your record albums like cold, frigid women. You could be more silent than silence without much of a fight. I float, a birthday party balloon you let go into the deepening sky. How I once felt my life against yours, two pieces of burnt toast. The town had zoned me for you, now I’m a wetlands— You can’t run your cable under my land anymore. There’s nothing wrong with you, just as there is nothing wrong with the sky. At my core, a humming gas heater, rusted, though still useful. Nothing loves the world as a mortal soul can. Yet the very word domestication sounds like a zoo for housewives. Let’s see—what prayer was it we were saying? Yes (of course), the one that got us here. Once I loved you madly, like a girl pirate, Now I use my sword to pick up moldy, low-loft towels from the floor. Now we wear headsets because we can’t hear our own music. Once I was your bride, now nothing more than a mermaid nun, And the sea is so choppy, torrential, wild, biblical with sadness. Oh, once you smelled of mint, of truth.
New Ohio Review 