All posts filed under: A Saturday Woman Poet

“Considering Their Pale Faces” and other poems by Erin Wilson

Published by

Seed tōgarashi / omoikonasaji / mono no tane the red pepper / I do not belittle / seedlings ~ Bashō I keep a chestnut in the breast pocket of my secondhand leather jacket. When I picked it I thought of (I don’t know why) my mother. The last time my first husband and I made love I knew my womb, because of my mind, was tipped at such an angle that no seed would germinate  there. This is also a true story. Our children and I collected acorns to use for a project we had not yet imagined. They exploded into weevil larvae all over the floor.   A Letter to My Ex Concerning Houseleeks I retrieve the hens and chicks, reminiscent of farms, from my sister’s yard and press them to the dirt in the small half-circle we dig in our own yard and then leave them there to grow and separate   The Mother The last bladder is emptied, the last gleek shot into the sink, the last struggling out of and into, …

“Tarmac” and other poems by A.M. Cousins

Published by

REDRESS After Junichiro Tanizaki. Give us this day your problems. Allow us to torment ourselves about shadow and beauty and good taste and we’ll swap all that we’ve got for one hour in the life of a tortured artiste who wants to sit in a fancy lav and listen to a mosquito. We’d leave the shadows to the banshee and the pooka, and the nun who died young – she lurks and snaps bony fingers as your backside hangs through a hole in a bench. You tilt forward to tear a scrap of newspaper. All useless decoration stripped in Sunday’s Well where Little Nellie dances for Holy God, Artane boys march and Heaney’s henhouse child views the moon through a chink in a plank. Ancient Magdalenes and crones – sister-stitchers with blackened teeth and white, pinched faces glowing overmodest grey kimonos – enhance heaven’s cloth, embroider Limerick lace. Give us this day. (published in The Stinging Fly.)   BLESSED after Padraic H. Pearse. I grudge them – more than any of you will ever know …

“Birth Mother” and Other Poems by Srilata Krishnan (K.Srilata)

Published by

Birth Mother We are standing in front of the mirror, my daughter and I, brushing our hair and being vain when I think of the doctor’s question: “What was her birth cry like?” I don’t know and never will. She is fine, or will be, I know. But looking in the mirror and into her almond eyes, I wonder what she is like – her birth mother – if she too, was once, afraid of words and of the fluttering of pigeons, if she has nicely formed arches on her feet and whether or not her eyebrows make a bow for good luck, if she is small and slender-waisted, if she is anything like my daughter, or was. Strange, but I don’t wonder at all about the father. I tug at her pony. “Amma, let’s go”, she urges into a mirror that is slowly swallowing her birth mother. Our eyes meet in that eye of a little god and she smiles the sort of smile that is like mine.   What Penelope Said to Ulysses …

“The Beaching” and other poems by Denise Blake

Published by

The Beaching   The pod of whales beached themselves on Rutland Island, chose the isolated sweep of the Back Strand to come ashore. My grandmother in her final years would have understood. Those long-finned pilot whales suffered some trauma, became distressed and confused. And so for her that winter when told her grownup daughter had died suddenly. Three years later, hearing that her eldest had also passed on threw something within her off-kilter. Sent her mind homing towards the Back Strand. The whales had wandered together, over thirty of them, swam through Scottish waters to the Sound of Arranmore, heading towards the crescent of shoreline and their ending. She would have understood, the Rutland-born woman who had long left the island but yearned for that place; called for it constantly, rose from her sickbed in the middle of the night. I need to go now. They will be waiting; it will soon be low tide. She wanted to journey, follow those already gone, float ashore, let grief beach her there on the Back Strand. Crockery …

|The Girl in The Photograph| and other poems by Shreya Barua

Published by

|The Girl in The Photograph|   I’ll take you by the hand and show you what it’s like to sit under neon signs when the city goes to sleep and you’ll have known a little bit more about what magic looks like I’ll take you by the lips and show you what it’s like to taste the snowflakes I caught on my tongue and you might get to know a lot bit more about what dreams feel like I’ll take you to places you’ll forget to remember I’ll show you things your eyes won’t believe until you start to wonder if I am real; if any of it is So, I’ll let go of your hand one final time break away from your lips one last time wrap all the magic and dreams around your little finger and go back to being the girl in the photograph |Syria’s Daughter|   I am Syria’s daughter. I will soon be just as forgotten as my name is. And when they come for me rummaging through heaps of …