Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman by Patricia Farewell
“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman” by Patricia Farewell She wanted to plant the long and learned Face-of-Virginia Woolf in her garden: a firm bulb whose roots would seek every direction, whose strong, fine, green stem would relish its time climbing the loam back to the light it had left on the waves of the river Ouse. Surely come spring a leaf unlike any other would brush her ankle and remind her that...
Mad Bad Sad Woman by Audrey Chin
“Mad Bad Sad Woman” by Audrey Chin If not for words I’d be a mad bad sad woman dancing on the razors edge petticoats flouncing...
Confessions of a Family Woman by Chivas Sandage
“Confessions of a Family Woman” by Chivas Sandage “Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate… a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own How strange it sounds: “family woman.” But “family man” ranks as compliment or defense, connoting respect for “a responsible man of domestic habits.” Or a general term for a man, responsible or not, who...
… and Stones by Gillian Barlow
“… and Stones” by Gillian Barlow She bends over to pick up a pebble – no, not that one – her hand skips across the roundish brown pebble to the black oval one and then on beyond to where she sees below the surface, the very one she wants – the chosen one. She curls her fingers around it, lifts it from the river floor and turns it over, feels its smoothness, its coolness, its rounded edges, the way the...
Audre Lorde’s Unfinished Business: Working Through Religious Resistance to Cancer Treatment by Pamela Yetunde
“Audre Lorde’s Unfinished Business: Working Through Religious Resistance to Cancer Treatment” by Pamela Yetunde I, as a pastoral counselor and theologian, have had the privilege of reading through Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s journals and diaries archived at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. Many people are acquainted with Lorde (1934-1992) through some of her more famous rally cry-quotes like, “The...
Copper by Caroline LeBlanc
“Copper” by Caroline LeBlanc A sculptor friend gave me his scraps of sheet copper although I had no immediate use for it. Still it shines, reddish, in the cellar after years of collecting cricket’s casings, after long summers of their rasping song. Even time has not dulled it, dry and wrapped tight in the dark, so no free elements oxidized it green or blue. Words can be like that, pristine as long as they are...
Contact Dance in the Mission District by Dawn Banghart
“Contact Dance in the Mission District” by Dawn Banghart She is there, sitting on the dance studio lower bleachers untying tennis shoe laces socks off, toes touching the rough paint chipped floor spandex tights snug at the knees, hugging her thick thighs a loose silk shirt swirls as she walks across the floor past us the small pod of early arrivals. She opens the windows and breeze rolls across her hand. We...
Practice by Alison Hicks
“Practice” by Alison Hicks The small precision: word matched to moment, finger placed squarely on the string, the pitch containing not only itself, but itself halved, and that halved, and again. Ratios that move the small bones of the ear translate resonance to the brain. Lives of sloppy shifts, wrong notes, mistakes in tonality. Late at night in the living room, try to make up for this. In your notebook, on...
Color Coded by Lauren Camp
“Color Coded” by Lauren Camp Since no one ever wanted to paint me, I took a brush elsewhere in the city— behind the white fence, into night. To my husband I said Find me there with the collapsible blue. What? he asked. Do I have to trail you through Dame’s rocket and upended furniture? I readied the skin and fat of my small piece of purpose, so tired of tallying a landscape to see it slung on screws for a...
Pentimento by Catherine Moore
“Pentimento” by Catherine Moore She painted over his works because she felt he had spent too much time in his blue period. The disemboweled female forms were barely swathed in bolts of lapis atop ecru. Draped over in wide eyes afraid—primitive empties, effigies of sad spoils. The figures needed their horror broken....
Droom by Margaret Chula
“Droom” by Margaret Chula M.C. Escher wood engraving, 1935 The bishop reclines on tassled cushions hands crossed at his waist in sweet repose. A praying mantis straddles his chest. Legs, knobbled like rosary beads, knead the red fabric of his robes. Thorax and forelegs cast a shadow over the bishop’s trusting heart. In the great beyond, arches of the coliseum hold up the night sky. Venus and Jupiter shine out...
Studio Visit: Later by Susanna Lang
“Studio Visit: Later” by Susanna Lang Alice Berry What’s left—bobbins, scraps of fabric, reds and pumpkins in one bin, blues in another. A jacket, dark as its corner. I remember tea in a fairy tale harem splashed with glistening silks that...
People as Evidence by Lauren Camp
“People as Evidence” by Lauren Camp for Alice Neel Not so much the eyes but the middle of the gesture— early bloom, late wrinkle, the most multiple parts, nipple and fat roll. Leg and tangle and temper. It was that entrance to the center that...
Women, Windows by Lauren Rusk
“Women, Windows” by Lauren Rusk after Vermeer Light on a wall, a woman. Light— the pour of milk, her round forehead as she reads where he arranged her—each of those women— near a window to catch the glow, not look through. But to the women that...
The Power to Contemplate: An Artist Responds to Virginia Woolf by Jennifer Carson
“The Power to Contemplate: An Artist Responds to Virginia Woolf” by Jennifer Carson Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate … a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself. Several years ago, when my partner agreed that I could live in his house without contributing to the mortgage, I thought I had landed the perfect life. He had granted me Woolf’s five hundred a year. I...
Reading Virginia Woolf in the Nineties by Kristie Letter
“Reading Virginia Woolf in the Nineties” by Kristie Letter yes, Virginia in irregular rhythm and (extra) articulation, who thought beyond plotting, to take on and through and know mermaids (singing) and sisters who never flower into bards, swimming in words, sapping down difficulty becoming, re-evaluating Madonnas, beyond teen spirits into Victorian charms, a nose for truth, for key moments, the heat of the...
The Poem by Diane Furtney
“The Poem” by Diane Furtney “ . . . this loose, drifting material of life . . . Some idea of a new form. Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in an unwritten novel”–Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary It’s instinctive, the lift at it, the damp summer grassweed smell, and you think small: gopher, badger, fox; an over owl; between the weeds. Then these shallow ditches, and the low foliage...
The Only Surviving Recording of Virginia Woolf’s Voice by Alison Townsend
“The Only Surviving Recording of Virginia Woolf’s Voice” by Alison Townsend I’m not expecting to hear her speak, stopped as I am at a red light in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on the daily, desperate dash home from work, my fractured spine throbbing as if it housed my heart not my nerves, this snippet on NPR as unexpected as recent November warm weather. But here she is, sounding husky and a bit tired, her plummy...
What Remains by Maggie Stetler
“What Remains” by Maggie Stetler — Remembering Virginia Woolf I. As a woman, I guarded my body too, longed for a mother, not a man, married for love and art but not sex. As a child in Pennsylvania, I dodged imaginary Cold-War bombs, pre-divorce barrages. In London, yours, a real war. No matter,...
Virginia Woolf’s Hollyhocks by Deborah Doolittle
“Virginia Woolf’s Hollyhocks” by Deborah Doolittle Country born, they are still the village gossips at the garden pump, watching the neighbor’s cat, the doorman’s dog, the grocer’s delivery boy. Some say there is always something new to look at. It is a commonplace they cannot help repeating: how the days come to them in exaggerated quantity and the hours slide past like slugs and snails. How they don their...
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Witness Nov 29, 2024
