Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism
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Women of Resistance - OR Books
WOMEN OF RESISTANCE
For my daughters, Skyla Emerson and Cassidy Rilke— and for my mother, Jacqueline. – D.B.
For my mother and my sister, and for the women who braved this world before us, brave it beside us, and who will brave it after. – I.M.
Anthology selection © 2018 Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan
All rights information: rights@orbooks.com
Visit our website at www.orbooks.com
First printing 2018.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. Permissions information for individual work is at the back of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Pauline Neuwirth
Published for the book trade by OR Books in partnership with Counterpoint Press.
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.
paperback ISBN 978-1-944869-79-3 • ebook ISBN 978-1-944869-80-9
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
DANIELLE BARNHART AND IRIS MAHAN
SECTION I
a woman’s place
DENICE FROHMAN
Hunger
DENICE FROHMAN
Bamberg, 1628
LAURA FAIRGRIEVE
Sally Ride Speaks to the Schoolgirls
LAURA FAIRGRIEVE
Female
KIMBERLY JOHNSON
The Children’s Chorus
JACQUELINE JONES LAMON
Civil Rights
JACQUELINE JONES LAMON
The Ride Home
JACQUELINE JONES LAMON
Not Even
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
Image
JAMES ALLEN HALL
Of the Swan
JERICHO BROWN
The Legend of Big and Fine
JERICHO BROWN
This is why we are afraid:
JADE LASCELLES
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
KIM ADDONIZIO
Snow-Day
JUDITH BAUMEL
Getting a UTI
LAURA THEOBALD
Untitled
LAURA THEOBALD
SECTION II
An Open Letter to the Protesters Outside the Planned Parenthood Near My Job
ELIZABETH ACEVEDO
Poem Beginning with Items from The Vienna Museum of Contraception and Abortion
JOYCE PESEROFF
Skin II: Firebird
HOPE WABUKE
Rib
HOPE WABUKE
Black Funk
KWAME DAWES
Gender
KWAME DAWES
The Secret Life of Mary Crow
DOROTHEA LASKY
This is a Screwdriver, She Says
KARYNA MCGLYNN
California King
KARYNA MCGLYNN
Kiss Me
SANDRA BEASLEY
Ladies Weekend in Brooklyn
DANIELLE CHAPMAN
Service
ADA LIMÓN
dowry
SAFIA ELHILLO
zihour
SAFIA ELHILLO
after
SAFIA ELHILLO
SECTION III
The Four Nights She’s Gone
STACEY WAITE
Epithalamion
LAUREN CLARK
Vortex Temporum
LAUREN CLARK
What She Thinks as She Waits by the Door
PATRICIA SMITH
That’s where you disappear
MONIKA ZOBEL
Photo: White Woman Sitting on Black Woman as Chair on MLK Day
AMANDA JOHNSTON
When My Daughter Wasn’t Assaulted
AMANDA JOHNSTON
It Was There! Now it’s Gone. No, Wait There it Is
ANASTACIA-RENEE
Elegy with a White Shirt
CYNTHIA DEWI OKA
Anise swallowtail, moulting
FRANCINE J. HARRIS
Am Ha’aretz
ROSEBUD BEN-ONI
1991
ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL
A Woman and Her Job
ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL
Naturalization Study
WENDY XU
On Mate & the Work
RUTH IRUPÉ SANABRIA
Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits
RACHEL ZUCKER
And Still I Speak of It
RACHEL ZUCKER
January, after El Niño
RYKA AOKI
SECTION IV
Woodtangle
MARY RUEFLE
shiv
RACHEL MCKIBBENS
Hagar in the Wilderness
TYEHIMBA JESS
If 2017 was a poem title:
MAHOGANY L. BROWNE
Heritage
KAVEH AKBAR
Poem for Suheir Hammad
TRISH SALAH
Ode to the Pantsuit
LAUREN K. ALLEYNE
Madame X—
LAUREN K. ALLEYNE
Matriot Acts
ANNE WALDMAN
In Support of Violence
CHRISTOPHER SOTO
The March
ACHY OBEJAS
Meanwhile
MAUREEN MCLANE
Heidenröslein
MAUREEN MCLANE
To the breasts when it’s over –
ELLEN HAGAN
To the woman on St. Nicholas Avenue whose thigh was a wilderness blooming –
ELLEN HAGAN
Lucky Ladies Sestina
JILL MCDONOUGH
Folsom Street Fairytale
JENNY JOHNSON
There Are New Worlds
JENNY JOHNSON
CONTRIBUTORS
THE EDITORS
PERMISSIONS
INTRODUCTION
I am, she said,
though borne into demolition.
—Poem for Suheir Hammad
by Trish Salah
This anthology does not have a singular purpose. It is part love letter, part manifesto, part confession, part wish—and those are just the raw materials.
It is also a meditation on grief. We grieve for the women we have lost, the violence and oppression we endure, and the children who will never make it to the terrifying and glorious world of womanhood. These poems surge forward with defiance and insist on the power and endurance of the feminine spirit. The work here breathes, occupies space, and demands attention, not only for women, but for all who fall into the category of other within the bright white patriarchy.
We exist through acts of demolition—as one would walk through flames, and come out on the other side. This book began as the idea to engage in a small act of resistance. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, you could find us commiserating on barstools in the Village, sniffling through a poetry reading, or consoling one another during late night phone calls. We found ourselves pondering that historic act of resistance, that fight for agency through suffrage. As poets, we wanted—needed—to know what suffrage meant to other poets.
Here we required a definition, but also a history. The word suffrage
in its Latin form suffragium—meaning support, ballot, vote
—did not come into such popular usage in English-speaking nations until the U.S. began drafting its Constitution in the 1770s. Suffrage came from Middle English, meaning intercessory prayer, or prayer on behalf of others. What power does a vote hold when cast for an oppressor? What do liberty and freedom really mean when they are empty words that were exclusionary then, and remain so? The Suffrage Movement was a galvanizing success and a heartbreaking failure, and it is in this place of strength and brokenness that we began the work of this anthology. We shed the suffrage, and began with an invocation on behalf of otherness. What can we do?
one of us would ask. You are doing all you can—you are enough,
the other would reply. You are alive.
We are, but it continues. Powerlessness, poverty, assault, unjust legislation, mutilation, degradation, rape, forced sterilization, and murder have all been used as means of controlling women and shaping our realities, for countless generations. Whether large portions of the population have chosen to ignore this (or continue to ignore this) does not change it. And yet for many, there is a growing sense of urgency that simply wasn’t there before. Whether due to privilege, willed ignorance, lack of information, or caprice, many of us have been able to shield ourselves from the truth. But the truth is that we are all in danger, and we are all suffering. Some of these dangers are glaringly obvious, others more insidious, but all are real, and incessant.
Equally real, incessant, and varied are our passions, our strengths, and our stories of triumph. This is how we found our way to creating this anthology. While there might be some universal truths, there is no universal experience. Attempting to speak for one another, or for women as a group is unacceptable, and often destructive. For too long women have canceled each other out—silenced other individuals in favor of a supposed unifying movement—and it has been a travesty.
In her essay, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,
Adrienne Rich writes:
Women have been driven mad, gaslighted,
for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other…
When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
This book is a collection of truths. These poems are personal truths of intersecting feminist realities that make meaning not only from the necessary and varied individual experience, but from the context of their togetherness. May we all find ourselves in the moment