Woman Warriors: Babae/Babaylan by Aimee Suzara
“Woman Warriors: Babae/Babaylan” by Aimee Suzara Babae = girl or woman Babaylan = a shaman of ancient times who is usually two-spirited Dalaga = a young woman Diwata = a spirit of nature and the trees. Babae Babaylan Dalaga Diwata Women are the healers mothers sisters and daughters Lorde Angelou Kingston and Assata Words to nourish nations like mecca and water Babae Babaylan Dalaga Diwata Women are the...
Wild Faith by Karla Morton
“Wild Faith” by Karla Morton All angels, good and bad have the power of transmutating our bodies – St. Thomas Aquinas This is how we claim life – a little wild yet, transformed by drinking rain from wolf prints. We are pack stalking. We are women walking. There is not much difference between woman and wolf, the love of the hunt, the steady cadence, the stare of black-lined eyes. Even the square...
Anne Frankenstein by Deborah Thompson
“Anne Frankenstein” by Deborah Thompson When I open my journal, Anne emerges from her hiding place to hover at my shoulder. Does this happen to all female Jewish writers? I began to keep a journal at age 11 after reading The Diary. I named my journal Anna. “Dear Anna,” I’d write, and then describe my pre-teen travails to Anne Frank in her voice. “Terri Goodman whispered to Amy Bloom in the temple carpool that...
Tortoise by Naomi Westerman
“Tortoise” by Naomi Westerman Extract from the full-length play. Setting: A secure psychiatric hospital ward. ISOBEL, 30s, a fragile woman with bandaged wrists, hides inside a fort made out of bedding. She is alone. She sits in silence for a long time. Finally (for the first time in the play) she crawls out of her fort. ISOBEL When I was five, I had a stray tortoise. We found him in our front garden, a...
You Accompany Parents Through Winter by Alice Cone
“You Accompany Parents Through Winter” by Alice Cone As you tend to your father this winter, when the surface is white, the sky smudged glass, may your breath swell and rest like the river as it courses through shadow and silver, trusting forward and chanting the chorus that will carry your mother through winter. When the air is so cold it would splinter and your muscles so taut they would collapse, may your...
Small Bodies by Alexandra Reisner
“Small Bodies” by Alexandra Reisner A six-year-old child’s eyes are set only about three feet off the ground, which is probably why the girls saw it first. We were coming from the tennis courts when I noticed two or three of them crouching. “What is it?” I asked as I knelt to see what they saw. It was a mouse—a baby—on its side in the grass. Its head was touched with blood, but still its sides rose and fell...
Some Secrets by Debbie Urbanski
“Some Secrets” by Debbie Urbanski Outside this window there used to be a tree. This is the first secret. Now all I can see is the sky which, today, lacks personality, a plain blue streaked with predictable clouds. My neighbor cut the tree down. Is this the second secret? Let’s say, for now, that it’s not, that it is more a continuation of the first. This neighbor of mine plans to cut down more trees soon, or...
Black Swans: A Poem for Voices by Katharyn Howd Machan
“Black Swans: A Poem for Voices” by Katharyn Howd Machan We are the black swans, the women who swim. Who fly at night. Who are the night. Our golden feet touch quiet water, skim shining surface, plunge deep to make currents in dark weeds. We come and go. We know each other’s names, each other’s dreams; we dream each other. Dream the flight past ragged moon, past singing stars, and it comes true. Dream the...
Coming in Second by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal
“Coming in Second” by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal Body chilled by years of neglect, my twin lies in a hospital bed trying to grasp how she’s come to this. The sum of my fears she’s the one person I dread I could be, save for some kink in our link of genetic fiber. Struggling not to catch her death of cold, I’ve steered clear of her notion that our birth was not just conceptual happenstance. Yet at times, I find...
Unity Orders by Kate Simonian
“Unity Orders” by Kate Simonian Hot stuff. Just-what-the-doctor-Orders. Five-foot-ten at twelve-and-a-half years old, with a body to be reckoned with, a body with curves we had just learned to describe as convex. Unity would have been memorable for her name alone—a sentence unto itself, one teacher said—but over the summer she’d developed a larger-than-life sex drive to boot. Libido had left her crooked. Her...
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August 8-9 | immersion | noon to noon EST
WAVES ALIVE is an immersive experience, held tenderly by the ebb and flow of ritual, sisterhood, creative expansion, then surfacing to share what we have uncovered about ourselves and our art. Creative sisters are invited to join us at any point and remain for any length of time during our full-circle offering.
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The Deepest Place Jul 26, 2025
