To Virginia by George Ella Lyon
“To Virginia” by George Ella Lyon If you knew I sat at your feet I think you do know If you’d seen me retrace your steps Hyde Park Gate where you were born Gordon Square ...
Re-interpreting the Carved Revenge on Your Own Back by Shauna Osborn
“Re-interpreting the Carved Revenge on Your Own Back” by Shauna Osborn In the White Tigers section of The Woman Warrior, we bear witness to a short-lived family reunion before our warrior heads off to battle. Her parents carve oaths on her back, making her body a text where genealogical memory is visible and an emotional connection to the family’s interests are made physical: “Wherever you go, whatever...
Unmaking the Form by Marya Hornbacher
“Unmaking the Form” by Marya Hornbacher Professor Firchow was a giant even when seated, like a bear who towers even when on all fours, and he had enormous hands that gestured slowly, gently, as a bear might gesture if it did. He spoke to us softly of Modernism, and the end of narrative arc, and multiple selective omniscience, and the poetics of fragmented time. I was a snippet of a girl, not yet twenty, shy...
Counting and What’s Counted On by Robyn Hunt
“Counting and What’s Counted On” by Robyn Hunt “Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.” (Virginia Woolf, Orlando) I know for sure: 1 I am married. 2 I own a home. 3 I write poetry – creating metaphor where others claim they cannot. 4 I have a daughter; she lives elsewhere now. 5 My grandmothers, both storytellers, lived well into their nineties, and in one...
Erotics of Making by Barbara Rockman
“Erotics of Making” by Barbara Rockman The woman brings her body to the page the way a climber clamps her thighs to the rock face the way a lover drops the last garment the way a girl crawls into a copse and, singing, arranges acorns and logs the way a mother skips away from the departing school bus. What is arousal? Words at the pen tip, ink rich as...
The Task by Alison Hicks
“The Task” by Alison Hicks Late at night into the time before dawn is best. Too easy to put off in the afternoon— how long until cocktails, a swim, dinner? Salvage enough to approach sideways, crab-like. Lighted by what you wanted, present what you’ve lifted proudly, though it might be refused. You could be drinking, pouring a mug to really twist you up. Instead you’re here. When it is dark it seems...
Against My Own Current; Out in Plain Air by Lisa Lutwyche
“Against My Own Current; Out in Plain Air” by Lisa Lutwyche I haven’t worn a swimsuit in over fourteen years. I’ve walked on a beach or two, sat by swimming pools watching other people swim, but always wearing shorts and a tank top myself. The only people to see my torso uncovered, or barely covered, have been medical personnel, my husband, and my brave, then fifteen year old daughter, right after my...
Make a Body by Nancy Meyer and Janet Trenchard
“Make a Body” by Nancy Meyer and Janet Trenchard First chip away at a block of granite, pour water over it, rub with oil. In her hands, the heft of chisel, hammer, pitcher. Dust whitens the floor, leavens her hair. Studio walls close in, tools slip, she wheezes with each breath. Should she leave it out in a rain storm, hope for lightening’s magic crack? Climb above tree line, spine against the boulders’ heat,...
Snatch by Christine Wade
“Snatch” by Christine Wade A woman invented and named an art form while she was sleeping. It is called the Snatch. It is a short piece of writing, usually one page. It is many words strung together. A Snatch is not rarified like a poem. But sacred, none-the-less. Nor is it a fairy tale. Although it could be an old wife’s fable . . . it could be a birth story. A Snatch smells sweet and is under the word count....
What It Takes by Karen McElmurray
“What It Takes” by Karen McElmurray Recently, I was part of a panel discussion on strong women called “Kiss My Grits: On the Badass in Appalachian Literature.” It was easy to think of any number of strong women who are badass in the books I love most from the mountains. Gertie Nevel in Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker came to mind first, followed closely by other strong women characters like Carrie Marie...
Terrible Girls by Jennifer Patterson
“Terrible Girls” by Jennifer Patterson Inspiration moves between their bodies and mine. We try to catch it, trace its lines on paper. Petra Rowan Rhines brought me to Helene Cixous and one time, from an airplane, she texted me a long passage from Cixous. I imagined her, Petra, peering out of her window trying to find me below the cloud cover in a valley between two mountains. (Always in between.) She is very...
Fragments of Anna Dickinson by Sarah Hahn Campbell
“Fragments of Anna Dickinson” by Sarah Hahn Campbell In response to your inquiry. . . . . .This is a photograph of Anna Dickinson in 1862. Anna stands behind the carved chair in which the great Susan B. Anthony poses with one hand in her lap, the other holding a quill over a sheaf of paper at a desk. Anna’s plain black Quaker dress buttons up her neck. . . .In this photograph, Anna stretches naked on a...
Retro Causation by Peggy Dobreer
“Retro Causation” by Peggy Dobreer If you are alienated in your own house how can your wings ever unfurl? –Maxine Hong Kingston She’s got some nerve. Some call her the maker of the Procrustean bed, hospital corners. Don’t be too smart, too strong, too epiphanied. Temporary infertility is to be expected in art. She had the bad itch. Was restless as water but looked cool as can be to the outside....
A Meditation on the Wave by Sarah Hahn Campbell
“A Meditation on the Wave” by Sarah Hahn Campbell I was 19 the first time I glimpsed the ocean, and I didn’t see it from the shore of my own country. An Iowa farm girl at an Iowa college, I’d applied to do my junior year abroad in Nottingham, England. My first view of the ocean, then, was from a United Airlines plane at 35,000 feet, in the middle of the night. I woke, peered out the window, and couldn’t...
She’s Got Some Nerve by Janet Fitch
“She’s Got Some Nerve” by Janet Fitch It takes some nerve to be a woman writer. In the Mae West film Night After Night, a coat check girl exclaims, “Goodness! What beautiful diamonds!” West quips, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” The same is always true with writing. Putting our thoughts on the page, making people see the world from our point of view, has nothing to do with being good,...
Last Class by Shawn Lacy
“Last Class” by Shawn Lacy Close your eyes, she says; it won’t hurt you, at least not in this form–tactile prompt, giggles around the room, word association, trust, faith, reliance, friendship, back to trust. Not yet feeling that I have any tips to give to a soul about writing, I decide to go for the “close your eyes and hold out your hands for the object,” a sugar cube. One is often taxed with the reality of...
WAVES: AROHO Retreat 2015 by Kristi Crutchfield Cox
“WAVES: AROHO Retreat 2015” by Kristi Crutchfield Cox That summer, turning forty and evaluating my choices in life, roads taken through Oklahoma, the grey slickness, red crumbling, swelling clay churned in fields, sticking to me, claiming me. I was supposed to live in New York, sidetracked by farms and families, frustrations and illness. Paths changed. Maxine arrived in an email, I held her face in my hands,...
Pollination by Barbara Ann Yoder
“Pollination” by Barbara Ann Yoder Monday after the AROHO retreat I woke up early, came into my kitchen and looked at the sun—almost an eclipse behind bay fog—then tasted the sweet tang of Meyer lemon, the first fruit borne by my four-year-old tree. I watched a spider tiptoe up my bathroom wall, as if she too had just awakened, her legs as delicate as eyelashes, her eyes bulging to take in as much of the...
Writing in Mothertime by Geri Lipschultz
“Writing in Mothertime” by Geri Lipschultz Ours is not the world of mothertime. We don’t live there but some of us write there. Mothertime was never on the map, nor in a book. Unrecordable, its wave undetectable, its mouth knows when to stay closed. Mothertime exists in those moments that come in a flash and then disappear, never to return. You could stitch these moments together, and it would be a quilt of...
Against by Vero González
“Against” by Vero González I grew up on an island in the Caribbean. I learned to swim before I learned to walk, talk, read, or write. I remember my parents telling me not to swim against the current—not to even try. It was for my own safety. The implication being that the current was stronger than I was; that if it came down to a struggle between us, the current would win. As I grew, don’t swim against the current...
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Witness Nov 29, 2024
