She is a waif.
Her petal skin peels away
To the safe-lock of her budding heart.
She is brief.
Making way for fruits sweeter
And flesh firmer
Than her own supple limbs.
Green eyes gaze.
New life gasps inside her.
The confetti at her wedding was death.
LORNA SCOTT
How to Make Love Not Like a Porn Star
Teach me to make love not like a porn star,
make me a bed that has nothing to prove. Let’s laugh
at unscripted noises; let’s not care what it looks like.
Persuade my body to forget what it knows.
Let me breathe in and out to the fit of your hands.
Let me let myself not always be camera ready.
Show me a picture of me not doing a Marilyn Monroe.
Let me see that your eyes are not apertures.
Let’s sink to cliché, let your eyes be rock pools
I hitch up my skirt and wade in, reach down to return
dirty finger-nailed, with a fistful of small shiny stones.
Teach me to close my eyes without making them.
Teach me to expect no result, zoom in for no reason
on the cleavage of your chin my pinkie fits in.
Let us not talk about the size of anything.
Teach me to listen, find a gasp in your hello,
how you make it sound like the first line in a tall tale.
Let your tongue be a silver river. Teach me to sail.
Let there be hair. Let’s mention things that aren’t hard.
Let my breasts look unlikely in your fisherman’s hands,
the blisters and scars like snow globes I find myself in.
Let us wake with limbs tangled as Chinese puzzles,
and garlic bread by the bed. Open your eyes, lashes
like footprints of snow-laden birds; let me pull off the sleep.
ANGELA READMAN
homage to my hips
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
LUCILLE CLIFTON
Woman Solstice
On the longest day
head bursting with hidden thunder
I go to find icons.
I am bleeding
bruised red petals,
and thinking of old bones;
new cries.
The sheela-na-gigs
lie in a dank crypt
flanked by ogham stones
and carved shards,
tagged and crumbling.
The sheelas squat on shelves –
forgotten; defiant.
One opens her legs
in a glaze of red,
one mocks death
with a thick glare
and a thrusting tongue.
Another gives herself joy
with a finger
on her pleasure pulse.
Some are featureless,
breastless,
but all open knees
pulling wide labia
with large, insistent hands.
They dare the eye to recoil.
The longest day
throbs to an end
blue light fading slow;
as I watch the roll
of the moon’s disc
behind gathering clouds,
I am lying on cool sheets
splay-thighed
and smiling.
KATIE DONOVAN
Descendant
Not from the warm heart
of America or the flatlander folk
our mother recalls
drinking Whiskey Sours
in her parents’ Wisconsin garden –
we are of these hornblende hulls,
Pacific, salted, our faces
freckled with quartz, feldspar
and St Helen’s ash.
Here there is no long summer.
We are saplings
grown in pine’s shadow –
stunted, pale, our nails black
from digging loamy soil.
The vibration of glaciers
passing over granite
echoes in our spines, our skin
is woven from the wet
spore of decay. But I am
feverish from the seep
of magma, choked
by the hot breath of the mantle.
Sister, you must also
smell the sulphur-smoking
crater, hear the lisping
red tongues of tube worms,
feel the slip of the plate
subducting beneath
this fault. Tell me, sister,
you also burn.
KRIS JOHNSON
Professor
In my study of female circumcision
Amongst the Sudanese tribes,
It has been interesting to note
That the procedure has no noticeable effect
On subsequent marriage and childbearing,
And that few side effects trouble the patient.
It’s important to know how the women themselves
Champion the practice, or so I gather
When I am able to talk to them,
Which is not often,
Owing to the various tribes’ particular codes of conduct
Which I am loathe to break.
However, I have asked them to describe the procedure –
The knife, the needles, the sutures, the aftercare –
Not because I take pleasure
In hearing about such things (needless to say)
But because there isn’t the pain you’d expect.
They just go numb
As if the spirits have departed them
To race across the plains,
Trampling the dust of the plains
And disappearing over the edge of the world.
EVA SALZMAN
After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen
for the Third Time Before Bed
I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me!.. I’m Mickey!
My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we’re a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.
And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We’re pink!
she shrieks, and bounds off.
Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that’s wrong, too.
How to tell her that it’s what makes us –
black mother, cream child.
That we’re in the pink
and the pink’s in us.
RITA DOVE
Bless me Father
for I have loved another,
pressed my body
tight against theirs
until there was no space
left between us,
only the sound of our breaths
moving in unison
&n
bsp; like a slow symphony.
Bless me Father
for I have found pleasure
hidden in the old well
and I have drunk from it
until I was giddy,
overcome with delight,
until I wanted to shout
the name of God
from every roof top in Ireland.
Bless me Father
for I have fought
with your rules
on the bloody battle-
ground of my body,
for I had forgotten this song,
buried in the flesh of my soul
like a deep river,
singing through my veins.
Bless me father
for I have sinned;
I have listened
to you and your like
for far too long,
and I have ignored
the quiet voice whispering
between my legs,
exploding through my heart
and blessing me over
and over again.
SIOBHÁN MAC MAHON
I’ll Be a Wicked Old Woman
I’ll be a wicked old woman
Thin as a rail,
The way I am now.
Not one of those big-assed ones
With buttocks churning behind them,
As Celine said.
Not one of the good-natured grandmas and aunties
Against whose soft and plump arms
It is nice to lay one’s cheek.
I’m more like a scarecrow
In our gardens full of rosy tomatoes
Like children’s cheeks.
There are some old crones
Who are both vivacious and angry as a bee
With eyes on top of their heads
Who see everything, hear everything and have an opinion –
Grumblers since birth.
I’ll squawk and chatter all day,
Cackle like a hen over her chicks
About the days when I was
A young, good-looking girl,
When I led boys by the nose.
Colts and stallions I tamed
With the flash in my eye, the flash of my skirt,
Passing over infidelities and miseries
The way a general passes over his lost battles.
I’ll be free to do anything as an old woman,
Among things I still can and want to do
Like playing bridge or dancing
The light-footed dances of my days.
I’ll spin and trip on my sticklike legs,
Attached to my body like toothpicks to a kabob.
That old hag sure can boogie!
The young smarties gathered around me
Will shout and applaud.
An old woman like a well-baked bun with sesame seeds,
That’s what I’m going to be like.
I’ll stick between everyone’s teeth, as I did before
While with a wide hat and dresses down to the ground
I stroll through the landscapes of my past life.
Smelling the furze, admiring the heather,
On every thistle catching my undergarment – my soul.
RADMILA LAZIĆ
translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic
to my last period
well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.
now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?
LUCILLE CLIFTON
Hallelujah for 50ft Women
Hallelujah to lasses who got too big for their boots
who stepped outside the fitting rooms of Mother’s
eyes, hair cut with razors, pocket tattoos on a breast
that keeps the names of anyone who made it skip
a beat. Look to such a girl strolling home, 50ft tall,
a milkman’s light dabbing sequins on her skirt.
You don’t have to know if she’s going dancing too soon
or skated over the hours you slept. Marvel at one eye
at the flat window, looking in at sunburnt neighbours,
faces pink as the contents of a bubblegum machine.
Feel a woman breathe, all your furniture suddenly paper,
chairs scraping across the dollhouse floor of your world.
She breathes in, breathes out, walks on. Look
to keep up, consider the size of the act of her crushing
no one, carefully side-stepping policemen, helmets
glinting bottle caps, megaphones like wasps.
There is no weapon she drops, you see the only
weapon she has is herself, one finger trailing along
the frosted roofs of hotels concrete statues
like wedding cakes left out for the birds. Put faith
in the smallness of yourself, sweat by the river
as she slips off her shoes, cools a foot in the water
outside the opera house – a mirror of sky and skyfancying girls.
Look to the seagulls coasting on waves her toes
dip and dab, attempt to sing her praises without a tune,
envy them. Be afraid, one move can kill us, call her name.
Let us be ants on her palm, lifted, lifted to meet her eye.
ANGELA READMAN
On seeing the Furies in the sky
For all the world like a trio of wild-haired women
breasting out of that cloud – the prows of three ships
arms outstretched behind them, coasting the blue.
And why less real than this sunshine
back-lighting my garden, the halo
around the hedge, the green plastic chair
that holds my dreamlike limbs
– as unconnected to me as those three
on their way to vengeance against, please…
the summertime whine
of next door’s boys, desperate to cry out,
and their hammering father.
One of them soon will raise
the first fist, the ‘not fair’ hymn
to the ignored mother I can hear
saying to no one listening,
no one at all but me, saying ‘look,
look at those women up there, riding the day’.
HEIDI WILLIAMSON
Deaths of Flowers
I would if I could choose
Age and die outwards as a tulip does;
Not as this iris drawing in, in-coiling
Its complex strange taut inflorescence, willing
Itself a bud again – though all achieved is
No more than a clenched sadness,
The tears of gum not flowing.
I would choose the tulip’s reckless way of going;
Whose petals answer light, altering by fractions
From closed to wide, from one through many perfections,
Till wrecked, flamboyant, strayed beyond recall,
Like flakes of fire they piecemeal fall.
E.J. SCOVELL
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Previously published poems in this anthology are reprinted from the following books, all by permission of the publishers listed unless stated otherwise, or from the magazines or websites noted below. Thanks are due to all the copyright holders cited for their kind permission:
Hira A.: ‘The trials and tribulations of a well-endowed woman’ from The Missing Slate (themissingslate.com), by permission of the author. Kim Addonizio: ‘What Do Women Want?’ from Tell Me, copyright © 2000 by Kim Addonizio, reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on beha
lf of BOA Editions, Ltd, www.boaeditions.org; this poem is also published in Wild Nights: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). Moniza Alvi: ‘Picnic’ and ‘Blood’ from Split World: Poems 1990-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).
Mary Barber: ‘Stella and Flavia’, from Eliza’s Babes: four centuries of women’s poetry in English, c. 1500-1900, ed. Robyn Bolam (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). Sujata Bhatt: Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2013). Ana Blandiana: The Cricket’s Eye (1981), translation by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea first published in this anthology. Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze: ‘Could it be’ from Third World Girl: Selected Poems, with live DVD (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). Zoë Brigley: ‘Infertility’ from Conquest (Bloodaxe Books, 2012); ‘The Shave’, previously unpublished.
Kimberly Campanello: ‘The Green’ from Consent (Doire Press, 2013). Kate Clanchy: ‘Miscarriage, Midwinter’, from Selected Poems (Picador, 2014), by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Lucille Clifton: ‘homage to my hips’ and ‘to my last period’ from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, copyright © 1991 by Lucille Clifton, reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd, www.boaeditions.org. Anna Crowe: ‘Trunk of fig tree from Ses Rossells’ from The Figure in the Landscape (Mariscat Press, 2010) by permission of the author.
Imtiaz Dharker: ‘Honour killing’ from I Speak for the Devil (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). Katie Donovan: ‘Underneath Our Skirts’ and ‘Winter Soltice’ from Rootling: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). Tishani Doshi: ‘The Magic of the Foot’ from Everything Begins Elsewhere (Bloodaxe Books, 2014). Rita Dove: ‘After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed’, from Grace Notes (W.W. Norton, 1989), copyright © 1989 by Rita Dove, by permission of the author and W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Recognition’ from New Selected Poems (Picador, 2009), by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Helen Dunmore: ‘Three Ways of Recovering a Body’ from Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001).
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