“Detail” by Anon
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Whale fall is thick with charged
particles: flesh, bone.
Comes my manta shape:
flat, half-lidded eyes –
Song Eater, me.
I swallow what remains to be said.
Her last call spoke the letting go.
I becoming not-I.
Then she fell silent
under the weight of voracious worms.
Now she rests at root of ocean.
Potential music clouds around her.
And I come to eat that –
draw it into flat gray gullet
until the sponge of me is full with it.
Then I swim up
become a swell, a wave –
you can see me out here if you look,
curved like a hammerhead, driving
at the shore –
that scream you hear at night,
that’s me emptying.
“Song Eater” by Ruth Thompson, from Waves: A Confluence of Women’s Voices
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I think of the women artists and writers who came before me, women who kept making meaning in rooms that were too small for them. Women who wrote in margins, in notebooks, after children were asleep, after shifts ended, after sorrow gutted the house. Women who made art from scarcity. Women whose faith may not have fit the polished language of institutions, but who still wrestled with God in pigment, poem, cloth, and line. Women whose lives whispered what I am still learning: creativity is not frivolous. It is one of the ways we bear witness to being made by a Creator.
For me, writing has become a form of witness.
“In the Beginning, A Woman with a Voice” by Elizabeth Troyer
“Once Upon a Time” by Joan Roberts
“Once Upon a Time” reflects the conflicts of a mother of grown children.
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It slips between her delicate fingers,
Rushes to kiss the bare ground
The dream which she had been preparing to live.
“Softly, Imperceptibly” by Narges Nematpour
is WAVES
WAVES is our generative source, steady and ongoing call to each other, and tribute to the enormity of what we make, witness, and inhabit as creative women.
We see ourselves as co-creators in this voluminous, multimedia mother installation intended to innovate and elevate the collective memory and artistry of every woman who has ever lived with the boundless longing to create.
Submit Your Art and Writing to WAVES
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“… in my heart [this piece] belongs to Waves and nowhere else.”
– Niloufar Behrooz
Do you have a piece whose heart belongs to WAVES?
Our invitation to submit and receive is free.
WAVES ALIVE | a different way of being
