Introduction
So, I went through my binder of poetry last night, trying to pick The First Poem for this page.
And I couldn’t pick one.
Don’t worry, I’m not teasing you.
I stopped regularly writing poetry as poetry when I was pregnant with Flora. I journaled a lot — I have journaled regularly since I was in sixth grade — but I wasn’t writing poems any longer, and I wasn’t attending workshops, publishing, or doing any readings.
In my 20s, I regularly did all these things: published, read in public, workshopped.
It’s been a long time. The last poetry reading I did was on my birthday in 2004.
One thing that runs as a theme through my poetry is the idea of body; my words of poetry as deeply rooted in my experience as a physical being.
And, er, quite a bit of it is about teh sex, especially sex with certain people who weren’t Dan, sometimes in passing, and sometimes explicitly. That’s going to be awkward I imagine, for my family members who regularly visit this blog (hi, Dad!). I will issue disclaimers.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say is:
1. I wrote this poetry a long time ago.
2. It’s not necessarily family friendly fare.
3. Some of it contains profanity.
4. A lot of it — most of it — is about the experience of being embodied as a woman.
Also, I’m trying to figure something out here, namely how to keep the most recent posts here at the top. that will be a work in progress. I want it to work more as a blog page, not a page page. I need to learn some WordPress tips.
Without further ado.
This was published… somewhere, some time ago. I need to track down some of those details.
++
Red
I go to bed
with a hot water bottle;
I am thinking of rivers,
the trickle of mountain snows,
the word turgid.
I think: open.
I think: flow.
I am sitting, a damned river;
nothing is red anywhere.
The way I know these words
can dry up in the middle of the page
is the way I know my body
can stem secrets
hold them to itself.
The pain in both these things
is equal, is pressure;
makes me grit my teeth,
think: flow.
In the dream
people throw fresh eggs at me;
they break against
my chest, my
outstretched hands.
Red Pen Mama 