NarrativeNortheast

BLOOM — Cynthia A. DiTaranto

on January 11 | in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Sometimes little girls go topless in the warmth of the summer afternoon sun. There was no sense of embarrassment brought on by exposing our bare flat chests. Traffic didn’t stop, no one whistled and life went on in an ordinary manner.

Then one day my breasts began to bloom. Although hardly noticeable, it was sufficient for acknowledgment by the elder women. I was excited to be getting my first training bra with the tiny, pink bow demarcating the middle of my chest until I realized that it meant I would have to wear it every day. Still, it signified that I was catching up to the older girls.

Like a bride, I waited to be swept across the threshold. Childhood was on one side. What I imagined to be on the other would prove to be quite different than the fairy tales I grew up on. I hesitated teetering in the gateway. Some days I took a step forward only to jump back and land on the other side. Many of my friends whizzed past me; a few straggled and then, stood their ground. I chose to move forward but I left the door open—just in case.

As I grew, I graduated from the flat piece of cotton material that ensured that my little buds would be hidden from society to a more form shaped apparatus. My new triple A bra had two distinct sides—cups as they are called. Other girls developed faster. Their breasts blossomed quickly, some becoming large coconuts; mine remained sweet peas. Although at times I was embarrassed by this fact, I never resorted to padding my bra with tissues, at least not in public.

Eventually my sweet peas flowered into an A cup and at some point a B cup. I was not destined to be a Dolly Parton look alike. Still, I became part of the world that compelled breasts to be confined. Different strait jackets were required at various times: regular bras for everyday use, sports bras to keep those puppies from bouncing, underwire bras to push up against gravity, cross your heart bras to lift and separate—there goes the cleavage, strapless bras to assist in holding up strapless dresses, nursing bras for easy access. I can’t leave out all the bras invented to accentuate female sexuality: corsets with or without garter belts, black lace or fishnet bras, cups with circles cut out to expose the nipple bras. The list goes on.

I never questioned this imposed constriction on my body until I went to college and enrolled in a feminist movement class. I learned about women burning their bras. The impact of the phrase on the women’s movement-Burn Your Bra-opened a Pandora’s Box. It seemed like such a simple yet novel idea. Could I really allow my breasts to brush loose against the inside of a white cotton t, fall and settle gracefully at will or feel their rhythmic movement? What about me? What other constrictions do I need to set myself free from? My breasts would not be silenced. They had a voice and spoke to me, “Find a way to set yourself free!”

Cynthia A. DiTaranto is the author of two self published, color illustrated children’s books with Trafford Publishing and hase written for various goat journals. She is seeking representation for her novel StrongHold. She is also a member of Women Who Write in New Jersey and holds a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A.T.
Read More »
Goddesses by Carole Kaufmann

on January 9 | in Art & Photography | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Goddess 2004-35

Goddess 2004-35

Goddess in Landscape w love, pencil, gouche, colored pencil, 30x22

Goddess in Landscape w love, pencil, gouche, colored pencil, 30x22

Goddess 2004-2,Pencil play on paper, 50" h X 38.5" w

Goddess 2004-2,Pencil play on paper, 50" h X 38.5" w

Pencil play on paper, 50" h X 38.5" w

Goddess 705-16

Goddess 705-16

Pencil play on paper, 30" h x 23" w

Goddess 200034-28

Goddess 200034-28

Pencil play, 30" h x 22.5" w

Goddess with Liberty

Goddess with Liberty

art, Carole KaufmannGodess 2004-6

art, Carole KaufmannGodess 2004-6

Godess 20034-35

Godess 20034-35

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Carole Kaufmann has traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Far East as is evident in her paintings and drawings which evoke her fascination with people and places around the world. She uses oil, gouache, pencil and transfer mediums, often using Chinese paints and collage materials. Her work is in many private and corporate collections worldwide, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Since 1972 she has worked and shown from her New York City studio.

(As curated by Alex Esposito for Narrative Northeast)
Read More »
SOMEWHERE ONE — Rachel Eliza Griffith

on January 6 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I go right through that opening, pulled
by the howls. The stars shine
like hooks over the flat land.
In the dark a cactus touches my arm.
What did I do? What have I been Before?
Got up from the bed inside, from the night,
nude, opened. I opened the door & looked.

The moon was like an actress,
warming the unsaid
words with white, cool glances.
What hour is this
in the mind, what is that
year always going
ahead of me like a siren on a rock,
low then high,
sanctimonious, snickering,
softening the mouse-tall corridors of psyche
with yellow light.

The few times I remember,
as a girl, doing this. Getting up to walk
like the dead. Going out of the house,
soundless with my childhood
& the woman twisting
beneath the vellum of her
stillness, bare-footed in the bliss

of a waking dream,
a woman opaque as wind light,
scratching the limbs of sycamore
& catalpa, thinking
of nothing but the water she is,
pouring out
over the ground in an unknown place,
following the mind’s gleam
like a cinder.

Cacti grazing hip-stalk, mosquito,
nightbirds, jazz. The mule deer.

I bathed in the tears of the coyote,
I listened beneath the water,
unstitching my skin, & folding it
over the ledge of every word.

I’ve ever been. Used, repeated,
revised. I’ve been that.

I bathed in their shaggy tears.
The distance in the mind,
nearly planetary. Celestial in its narrow blossom:

the brain stem, the spine, the ticking hammer
crowned by nipple, brown fig.
I’m too far to see
their slanted shapes.

Gander-pimpled, my skin
squeezes its mouths closed. Ecstatic, stellar,
the stars burn through their net, fall
from the rim of cinders, burning.

Brightness in the dark, please
believe something.

I turn into every shadow I’ve ever envied,
stare at them until they form another woman.

I touch her shoulder of flames. I pull her
waist of night toward me. We rock above
the howls of the tribe. The coyotes
move off, answering the hunger,
the syncopated swing
of brush & self –

torture, the embrace of two
motherless women, pouring blood
into a basin of memory.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her forthcoming collection, Lighting the Shadow, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015. Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. Please visit: www.rachelelizagriffiths.com.
Read More »
BEFORE YOU – Kwame Dawes

on January 5 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

1

Yes, we were country, lived in shotgun
shacks, where the road loses its way
to dirt and live oaks and all along
the way ancient cypress, but we’d play
deep in the swamp, where Collins
built his still, and made sweet peach
moonshine; that is where we made stories
to cherish in our hearts, a place to reach
for something warm, something to make
a woman remember the blood rush
in the head, singing and doing the shake
and stump to the blues; there in the bush
where she was that pretty thing; her eyes
soft with needing, her mouth full of lies.

2

Yes, we was country, but even a country
girl knows the power of her coochie,
how it could wake her without mercy
late at night because of the sweet mystery
of a dream; because of the scent
of burning tobacco in the air, the taste
of man; country, but I learned
the calming of liquor, how all haste
leaves the head, how big laughter
can rise off the skin like mist at dawn.
Country, but I was a fine believer
in the power of my waist-line, the bone-
shifting sweetness of nights of blue air,
the juke joint where you let go all cares.

3
Before you man, I didn’t join no church;
before you, man, Bessie Smith was my girl;
before you, man, used to wear my skirt
hitched up high around my thigh, used to twirl,
show off my hairy legs, so men could think
of all that hair climbing up my thighs.
Before you, I told God to just wink
for a minute while I learned the soft sighs
of women; before you, man, there were
no fences, no gates, just a wide
road; before you, I used to swear
like a whore and dance, all wild
and loose; so don’t think I have forgotten,
despite my new self, this good holy Christian.

4

Before you, man, I traveled, Lord, I traveled.
Every town from Mississippi to Pennsylvania
was a shelter and I found a place to revel
in the freedom and glorious regalia
of a queen girl, wearing silk and satin
and shoes so pretty they became a drug.
Before you, man, people called me “Passion,”
or “Fast Rose” or “Magdalene,” who ain’t any
better than any hard-dancing girl; I made men
weep for their mamas, made bad women
soft so they wanted to call be “best friend
for life, sweet sister,” and be my mother hens.
Before you, I could run, man, but now
you have caused this fast girl to take it slow.

Kwame Dawes is the author of nineteen books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies. His latest collection, Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon), appeared in 2013. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of
the Calabash International Literary Festival.
Read More »
PARROTS — Tess Tabak

on January 4 | in Fiction | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Before today, it had never really occurred to me that cousin Emily was a normal person. No; that sounds wrong. She was too normal, that was the problem: a middle-aged woman with carefully-straightened hair, Christian husband, Christian kids — not Jewish like us. Maybe it was all to please her mother, a blonde and blue-eyed shiksa who had whittled her Jewish daughter into her own image until nothing ethnic remained; Dad says even Emily’s nose was fake, surgically flattened as soon as she was old enough. There seemed something sad about her life in Maine, where they ate lobster every night and lived quietly behind a white picket fence.

But today Emily is smiling, happy like never before. Some women crumble after a divorce, unsure of themselves, but Emily has blossomed into a person she’d never had the courage to be. Holding hands with Karen at the brunch table, Emily seems like someone else, someone bigger than life. Even her hair is bigger; tentative sprigs of frizz have sprung free in New York’s August humidity. It’s funny: Emily’s old home with her husband was alien and WASPy, her three kids obedient like mice – a take-off-your-shoes-before-entering kind of thing. But this Emily, eating a bagel and lox beside her girlfriend, feels like family.

Emily takes the reins of the conversation, telling the story of how they’d met (at the law firm where she worked). There are some omissions: whether she’d met Karen before or after leaving John; why she’d stayed with him so long (was it for the sake of her mother, or had it really been an honest mistake? Can you just wake up in your forties, suddenly gay? Or did she think that she could iron herself straight as easily as she had done her hair?).

There’s an old joke: two Jews, each with a nose job, marry. Then, when a baby comes along, it has a nose like a Macaw — and that’s God’s way of saying “booga booga”. The moral: If you try to change who you are, it always comes back to bite you in the ass.

In the kitchen, Mom and Grandma are huddled in private conversation:

“What do you think of Karen?”

“She’s a nice girl. A lawyer. John would have liked her.”

“Poor Betty. At least she got some grandchildren before it happened,” Mom says. She turns to me. “Don’t you get any ideas. You, marry a man. Better to marry a goy, even, than to get into all of this mishegas.” After a thoughtful pause, she adds, “It’s worse when it’s your own kid, isn’t it? Poor Betty.”

She pauses again as if waiting for an answer, but the conversation doesn’t call for a response, and they continue without one.

When they leave, packing into a cab after the usual heartfelt goodbyes, Grandpa turns to Mom with a look in his eye of something like pride. “She’s the third one in my family.”

“The third what?” she asks.

“Lesbian,” he declares. “It was Sylvia, then Muriel, and now her.” He nods to himself, satisfied by the list. “Three suicides too – Richie and Gladys and David.”

How absurd to count such a thing – as if lesbians were as bizarre as suicides, something to be classified and numbered.

Three lesbians in the family. Well Mom, like it or not, pretty soon there’s going to be a fourth.

Tess Tabak is a writer, filmmaker, and co-editor of The Furious Gazelle. She is a recent graduate of the Purchase College fiction program. Her short story, “The Miraculous,” will appear in the upcoming anthology Athena’s Daughter’s II from Silence in the Library. Tess can be reached at tesstabak@gmail.com or on twitter @tesstabak.
Read More »
Things Stuck in Other Things Where They Don’t Belong — Chen Chen

on January 4 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

My mother one afternoon in a cowboy hat, sitting on a Texan bench of hay.
Me in the same configuration of time, space, & cowboy hat.
The memory in my brain like a boulder in a haystack, like a bad joke.
The sun in our faces.
The year we spent in Fort Worth, Texas, our first year in America.
The fluent Not-English I spoke in kindergarten.
The blond boy from Germany in the same sandbox with me, laughing at my jokes.
His name, Eammon, pronounced like Amen, unlike any Chinese
or American name I’d ever heard, a funny humming
in my ears.
The soy sauce + Tabasco sauce + mud in my “soups.”
The exact same ingredients + sugar in my “pies.”
Me in the biggest kitchen I’d ever seen, running around the “island,”
chased by an elderly white man my father said to call
my “Texas grandpa.”
My father with his full head of black hair & British-inflected English
in the graduate religion program at Texas Christian University.
The grease-tang of kung pao chicken in my mother’s clothes,
always in my mother’s clothes, after long shifts at a dimly lit Chinese restaurant.
The hyper-sweet of strawberry candies
in my mouth—the best treat my mother would let me thieve from the buffet bar.
The Legos & little plastic trucks filling a metal barrel of caramel popcorn
my mother received as a Christmas gift, & after the popcorn was finished,
emptied out.
The Bengal tigers in the tightly fenced forest habitat in the zoo Eammon & I visited.
The sand from the sandbox in Eammon’s shoes, in mine.
The sun in our faces
as we sweated over castle construction & fortification, all afternoon.
The goodbye I placed in Eammon’s ear.
The motels & motels my parents & I found ourselves in, moving, leaving Texas
for Massachusetts, because my father was promised a scholarship.
The persistent idea in my head that a scholarship was an actual ship
& we’d soon board it & get to Massachusetts,
which was surely an island,
close to Iceland.
The Christmas card from Eammon, once cherished, now stuffed
in a box, some closet, along with my promise to write back.
The torn-out magazine grin of a young Ewan McGregor,
hidden between the 9^th grade pages
of The Catcher in the Rye.
Then in pivotal 10^th grade, the incident
of an accidental strand of my mother’s black hair
appearing between the golden pieces of fried tofu
in a dish we were serving to our French exchange student, Nicolas.
Nicolas, who was cute
but aggressively straight, & who three weeks into the experience
had begun to call everything in this foreign country
(except its college-aged women studying French)
almost unbearably “moche”—“ugly.”
& some time during this lively cultural sharing, I learned the French word
for “scar”—saw it over & over
in the French edition of the first Harry Potter book,
which Nicolas had given me when I stayed with him in Paris, & which
reminded me of the small bald spot
on the left hemisphere of my head
which I received one afternoon in Texas, when I was the skinniest,
sincerest Superman
& flew into the kitchen
where my mother was removing from the stove
(because she didn’t know she didn’t have to boil the milk anymore)
a saucepan of milk, still boiling
& we bumped into each other—“cicatrice.”

Chen Chen is the author of the chapbooks, Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press, 2016). A Kundiman Fellow, his poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Poetry, Narrative, Drunken Boat, Ostrich Review, The Best American Poetry 2015, among others. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a PhD candidate in English & Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Visit him at chenchenwrites.com.
Read More »
Woman At A Fruit Stand – Sarah Trudgeon

on January 4 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

The gew-gaws of false amber and false turquoise attract them.
“Like to like nature”: these agglutinous yellows!—Ezra Pound, from “Women Before A Shop.”

Oh, yes, I have apples, but you look like someone with the
finest taste: come in back and try my more tropical gew-gaws:
guanabana better than pina-colada, my guava, my bunch
of Praying Hands bananas, clasped in desire, one false
prophet in each divine finger. Come in here! Scrape the amber
flesh from my mango skin with your spoiled teeth
and pluck sweet floral lychee and rambutan eyeballs from their false-
eyelashed, raspberry shells. Peel back the leathery, turquoise
hide of my custard apples, smartly designed to attract
specifically you. And suck the seeds smooth before spitting them
out! Halve the big brown teardrop of my mamey; finger its flesh
like a goblet of baby-food, apricot-marzipan custard of youth. You want to.
Nibble gently, at last, my sunny canistel, the texture
like egg yolk, the taste like vanilla, but also like nothing else in nature,
like you, like me. Stranger than fiction, more like tumors or monsters—these
rot-stinking jackfruits, I mean. Our insides are all just the little agglutinous
hearts of nature: synesthetic, bruised and light-bright yellows.

Sarah Trudgeon’s poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sewanee Theological Review, Smartish Pace, and The TLS, and is forthcoming from The Nation. Her reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review. She was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2013 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She teaches part-time at the University of Miami.
Read More »
SHE — Patricia Brooks

on January 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

When she was born, they said,

You are small. Remember this.

Feel these safety pins

anchoring our strings in your palms.

She said,

So far, I’m just watching.

When she began to walk, they said,

Keep your chin down and

carry this urn on your head

like your very own

porcelain pitcher enclosing

the flower of your worth.

She said,

I often trip.

Out.

They kept her in Rapunzel’s room;

but when her eyes reached the sill,

she clambered down that iron

and gulped urine-yellow phrases

off the sidewalk:

Dig it, people,

a soul can dance only

to its own beat.

They said,

Shit. Already the street dirt.

Take the brand and

shove it up.

Bind her up, they said,

She grew curiously calm and she grew

curiously taller, wore

pink gloves and cast-iron pantyhose,

spoke only when she was

spoken to, saying

I am studying. You are my models.

Your every syllable and sign

is stamped on my skin.

They were pleased, gave more play to the leash, said,

So long as you are good,

you may go and come.

This is called Freedom.

She said,

I want one of that and

two of those and I want them

now.

They said,

You are doing well.

But her body parts grew unruly,

began leaping, would not

stoop to their tasks.

Bind her up, they said,

everything but the breasts.

We like breasts.

Make your own milk, she said,

and even as they watched,

she embedded herself in their

newmown cement and fell silent.

Bang as they might, her skin

made no sound.

Sometimes though,

oh, every full moon or so, comes a thuck

of a sound, like unstuck footsteps, going

suck-er-u, suck-er-u, suck…

But of course they are certain

they must be mistaken.

Patricia Brooks is the former Managing and Fiction Editor of the Northwest Review literary journal. She has published two novels (Dell) and stories and poetry in a variety of print and on-line publications. Her newest novel is Whose Little Girl Are You?

Read More »
Primordial Mother — Jennifer Lothrigel

on January 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

When The Primordial Mother comes
knocking on your door
trying to convert you to her religion
and you look through the peep hole
but pretend you’re not home,
millions of stars burn out.

She often waits a long time
for you
before walking away.

Jennifer Lothrigel is an artist and poet residing in Southern, CA. Her work is an exploration of the feminine psyche, both personal and archetypal. She creates intuitively, draws from the mystery of the unconscious, and weaves her findings together. To learn more about her work please visit her website at: www.JenLothrigel.com
Read More »
MAY THE CHILD BE AT PEACE — Karina Lutz

on January 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

May the child be at peace.
May the child’s peace radiate to all in her grasp.
May the child’s peace radiate to all whose grasp she is within.
May the pedophile be at peace, and the coyote.

May the child soldiers’ commander be at peace.
May the commander’s arms dealer be at peace
and the arms maker
and the investor
and the pensioner
and the inventor of money.

And you and I, my friends, and you and I.

Karina Lutz is a writer, editor, teacher, and lifelong activist. She helped secure passage of sustainable energy legislation, thwart a proposed megaport, and restore wetlands in her home watershed of Narragansett Bay, RI. In 2013, she received honorable mention from Homebound Publications Poetry Prize for her manuscript, Preliminary Visions. Her poems have been published by Tulane Review, Blueline, Written River, The Wayfarer, Poecology, Bleeding Lion, Buddhist Poetry Review, and Green Living Journal and one is pending publication in The Transnational. She has performed her epic peace poem, “Encircling Earth,” at dozens of venues in New England.
Read More »
DARK MATTER — Erika A. Rist

on January 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I eulogize you
Sometimes Without
meaning to.

When I’m driving,
With only the dark
And the city non-stars
And the ghosts on the radio
To keep me warm.

I swear I don’t mean to.
The words find me
Write themselves
Scrawl themselves into existence
Bleed themselves onto my canvas mind

The words say that you
Were love incarnate
That I know love existed
Because of you
Even if it had never before been true
It was true with you

You ran around Earth a small cluster of stars
Quietly exploding
Radiating softly
Making it so all of us could see

If someone got too close, though,
From a certain direction In a certain way
If their coordinates were just a little bit off
You’d go spinning in the opposite direction,
Your gravitational fields nearly compromised

You were shaken and desperate
Knowing all the time
That the only thing holding you together
Was you.

I was scared that
One day You’d go spinning off
Away From me, too.

Four years ago, something
Entered your field
Pierced you
Snuffing out two sister stars
Whose home was at the middle of you

You tried to shoot away
You fought so hard
Screamed But no one heard you through the void
And you’d been pinned down.

You got worried After that
Anticipating the burn,
Cradling all the stars of you
With your too-small hands
Protecting them
From their inevitable apoptosis

I called you from California
To bleed on the phone with you
Saying that I’d been ripped through, too

A vacuum swallowed the line
As you finally spun from me.

Changing things you had
No right to
Because someone
Changed you
First.

What you pretended to forget
Though
Is that we were—
Are—
A binary system

I openly bleed dark matter.

You pretend you aren’t,
Cover the inking wound with your hair.

You’re in Philadelphia.
But I don’t know where you are.

Erika A. Rist is a Chicago transplant looking to thrive without too-deep roots. She is a feminist activist and aspiring attorney with lofty ambitions for herself and for society. Currently, she lives in Roger’s Park with a vindictive cat named Lady.
Read More »
THE SAME GROUND — Mary Crosby

on January 3 | in Poetry, Uncategorized | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Just now the swans
are sitting on the frozen lake

as if nesting.
Earlier they had flown in

like a fleet of jets
in military formation

turning when they reached the cove
then opening their enormous

white wings, five parachutes
gliding onto the ice.

What’s made them return
north so soon?

The covered ground the same
color as their wings.

Spread out on the lake’s
opaque surface they remain

motionless
frozen as ice sculptures

or regal chess pieces
poised for their usual move.

It’s a familiar pattern – like yesterday
while driving along a customary route

I ended up somewhere
I hadn’t meant to go.

Mary Crosby’s poems have been published in Calyx, Dos Passos Review, Earth’s Daughters, The Kerf and other journals. Her chapbook Alluvium Stream was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012. She is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Literature at Bergen Community College in Lyndhurst, NJ.
Read More »
SERENDIPITY AND WIT — Donna Barkman

on January 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

after An Artist [Begins Her Life’s Work] at 72.
Molly Peacock, subtitle for A Paper Garden

The happenstance of a few fallen petals, geranium red –
heeded by the keen eye of Mrs. Mary Delany, who then,
with initiative and acumen, snipped identical paper shapes
of a matching shade, layering them as the flower itself had done.

Magnolia followed, along with lobelia, nodding thistle,
damask rose, winter cherry, opium poppy, bloodroot,
all stunning in their verisimilitude of contour and hue: saffron,
scarlet, vermilion, cerise, turquoise, ivory, indigo, gold.

Each mosaick she produced – near one thousand —
was botanically correct, leaf-, stem-, and petal-perfect,
frank in its display of a blossom’s sexuality: pistils
and stamens aroused in 18th century Georgian England.

May Mrs. Delany’s lucky petals fall again
in metaphoric splendor before my eager eyes
awakening me to spit and fire with sensuality of word
and fearlessness of deed at whatever age I shall begin.

Born into a family of Oshkosh Wisconsin actors, Donna Barkman started performing in kindergarten. Her solo play, “Hand-Me-Downs” was recently produced in NYC and Westchester. Her poetry has been published in Chautauqua, String Poet, Per Contra, Boston Literary Review, Common Ground, Adrienne Rich: a Tribute Anthology, and others. She has enjoyed two arts residencies in Wyoming. Following a career as a librarian, with a degree from UW-Madison, she currently teaches children’s literature at Bank Street College, NYC.
Read More »
FIRST REPORT & P0EM — Jude Rittenhouse

on January 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Yellow, white, dirt
and hyacinths poking through snow: I am
not quite a year old. Two prepubescent boys
bang into walls, tables, each other, anything smaller.
Big sister tips her highchair. Mother’s belly
swells with the next one. The big man
who swallows all the oxygen
is not here,
as usual. I have been reading
the library of this place for ten months:
the books of my mother’s eyes and body
feel like my own. I am unable
to distinguish my tears from her unshed ones
or my clenched belly from her
tightly contained fury
acted out in the tomes of my brothers: their shouts
and fists breaking even air. All the words in this library
of flesh
feeling like fire or ice. The way any universe begins
or ends.

SITTING ON THE BEACH IN SHORE FOG

Decades, thick as this mist, rolled on: nothing
quite visible. Muffled lyrics of longings, damp pledges
chanted by invisible waves. Sea teaching me.

I might have been a singer, moving hearts
to dance and weep. Except I arrived with colic: a tiny
bundle of screams. Left to cry alone

because holding my writhing softness
could not comfort my depressed mother. The fog
is burning off now. Giving way to gray sky. I might

have played perfect rivers of grace on a silver flute.
Except, in that house with seven others,
all of them angry, starving for kindness, I survived

by going silent, invisible. I might have danced,
giving and taking joy through my body,
except for being invaded by grown men

when I was too young to be
believed and also too young to hate. I wanted to be
an angel carrying the world’s anguish up and away.

Instead, I am a chalice to this moment, now, of sun
absolving all the tears held by sky. Warming
miles of sand. Encouraging ocean’s groans and laughter.

Blessing all the humans walking one way, then
back the other as they search for the perfect shell or rock,
hoping for a seastar. For surcease from their daily quest

to be more. And, now, sun has made a pocket of blue sky
just big enough, like me, to hold
and release whatever is required.

Jude Rittenhouse has received a Writer’s Grant from the Vermont Studio Center and poetry awards from Glimmer Train Press, Inc., and Poets and Patrons of Chicago. Selections of her poems have also been finalists for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, including Nimrod International Journal; Tiferet: Literature, Art, & The Creative Spirit; River Oak Review; Newport Review; Her Mark 2005 (Woman Made Gallery, 2005); and The Kali Guide: A Directory of Resources for Women (Zenprint, 2002), among others.
Read More »
The Pink Suit Writes a Letter to Jackie — Bryanna Lee

on January 2 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

You should have left the blood on,
let the red ferment my Chanel like a beaujolais:
new, light-bodied, and acidic.
Imagine their faces!
A small stem like you cupping to catch
his brains as they poured from the car.

They didn’t get very far.
You caught them in your hat, your hair, your face.
You caught them with your lips,
reaching to kiss a slice of skull.
You should have stayed

in that lull and let the calm of his flesh
break the horror from yours like that first night.
Instead, you let them wipe your face.
Instead, they brushed the last of him from your hair.
You should have left him there.

A bit of brain could be all the rage—
“Add an Extra Bop to Your Bob”
splashing across the magazine page. Why not?
They’re telling boys blood is beautiful
through Playboys and draft cards,

dealing out guns like toys,
saying it will make them free.
They didn’t tell that to us.
They picked him from your hair like lice
and called it history.

Now the rock stars are crooning
and an airplane’s catcall
is whistling across the Pacific.
They told you we were too horrific—
said you couldn’t take it.
But when it’s my turn,
I’ll dip your brush in his blood
and paint the nation hush-red.

Bryanna Lee is a writer and editor in the Tri-State Area. Originally from Minnesota, she earned an MFA in poetry from Rutgers-Newark, where she currently teaches English composition and writing workshops. She was the 2012-2013 Joseph F. McCrincle online editorial fellow for Poets & Writers, and her work can be found in Selfies in Ink.
Read More »