Tag: Women

Chapter IV. The Suffocation of the Mother

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Savannah DiGregorio

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.

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What It Looks Like

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying 
compost out back,
I’m stopped 
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald 
on your lower wing. 

I hear her say, 
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting 
them differently?  
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop 
without any makeup,
and the way its face 
comes to a point 

at its delicate chin: 
really quite special.
To me, the mantis 
just stares, nods, 
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant 
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac 
is hard as cement to protect 
the eggs from heat, cold, 
even the occasional maternal 
appetite for its young.

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Horses in a Field

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

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.

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History of Desire

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa C. Krueger

Featured Art: Day 7 by John Sabraw

I.

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.

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Ode to the White Girl at the Gym

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Shavahn Dorris-Jefferson

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.

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A Coyote Runs Down Michigan Avenue

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sara Ryan

Featured Art: “The Bridge: Nocturne (Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge)” by Julien Alden Weir

and she is a phantom. gray blur on
gray pavement. green lights flicker

their rhythmic patterns. in the right building,
at the right angle, she becomes one

thousand coyotes shimmering in glass.
she screams and Chicago screams

back. howls. scavenges the oily corners
of the train stations. the river gulps

through its channels and feeds the lake.
she is a wild thing. she crosses high bridges.

she becomes the color blue. she becomes
the color blood. the city is haunted

now. by the trees. by women, their mouths
full—bulging, really—with fur. she is one

of the lucky ones. she runs unjailed without
worry for traffic, turn signals, speed limits.

ghosts wearing masks yell from
their windows. they’re warning her.

they’re warning her.

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Naked, Fierce, Yelling Stone Age Grannies

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art: by Evelyn De Morgan

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—

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Cockadoodledoo

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

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.

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Women in Treatment

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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.

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We Handle It

.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Gwen E. Kirby

Featured Art: Fisherman’s Cottage by Harald Sohlberg, 1906

We see him first at the reservoir, a middle-aged man with an oval of fur on his chest, nipples like button eyes, and blue swim trunks with yellow Hawaiian flowers. We are swimming, and he regards us from the shore in that way we are learning to expect from a certain kind of man.

Like every day in Tennessee, it is hot, and in the early afternoon, we walk from the stone campus of this small college to the lake. We are at a summer music camp, our fingertips sore from strings, our backs sticky with sweat, and when we reach the lake we shed our summer dresses and leap from a boulder into the water, which is deep and clean. Around the lake, tall pines and the heavy hum of Southern bug life. We float on our backs, conscious of how our breasts protrude from the water, pleased that we are sixteen, except for Caisa who is seventeen and over-proud of it. For her birthday, she buzzed her head. Her cheekbones are sharp and high, and even if she were not older, she would be our leader because she walks with confidence and draws checkers on the white rubber of her Converse in ballpoint pen, cheap ink that shimmers like oilslick. We wish we could go home and buzz our heads, draw on our shoes, but our faces are round, we like our sneakers white, we like our mothers happy.

The man doesn’t jump into the water. He walks down the wooden stairs to the dock, sits, then eases himself into the water as if it pains him. Though we don’t say anything, we cease floating on our backs, tucking ourselves under the surface, our heads and shoulders bobbing in a circle.

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