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Memories Flow in Our Veins
Forty Years of Women's Writing from CALYX
CALYX Editorial Collective, CALYX Editorial Collective
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eBook - ePub
Memories Flow in Our Veins
Forty Years of Women's Writing from CALYX
CALYX Editorial Collective, CALYX Editorial Collective
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Table of contents
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About This Book
Feminist icon CALYX Press has dedicated forty years to publishing the work of women writers, amplifying diverse voices, and creating a dynamic and inclusive literary space. Memories Flow in Our Veins commemorates the CALYX legacy and their contribution to the landscape of literature, while exploring the perennial themes of place and politics, aging and caregiving, and discovery and self-reckoning.
Featuring poetry and fiction by some of the most renowned and decorated women writers of the past four decades, Memories Flow In Our Veins is a triumphant showcase of the work published by CALYX Press through the years.
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The Space We Occupy: Women Embodied
The body. Such an intensely personal thing: a place of self, of desire, of incredible hurt, and of powerful joy. And yet for women, as for so many, this place of birth and of death, of hunger and satiety, of humanity and unspeakable cruelty is never truly our own. Women’s bodies have been, and continue to be, possessed, politicized, legislated, and discarded with little thought given to the intersections of place and space through which we move. Even to speak of “women’s bodies” simplifies the varying ways in which women inhabit bodies of different color, size, ability, age, location, and nationality.
Throughout history, whenever women look to challenge the status quo, they inevitably are chafing against barriers to their bodies—from the development of Nushu, the “women’s language” of the Hunan province in China to ease the physical isolation of foot binding and patrilocal marriage, to the movement for “rational dress” in the nineteenth century West, to ongoing battles over work, family, and reproductive choice. Breaking these barriers by writing freely about sexuality, rape and sexual assault, birth, weight, and aging is an essential part of beginning a dialogue to challenge the cultural notion that women’s bodies are mysterious, dangerous, and need to be controlled.
Breaking the taboo of writing about bodies is necessarily compounded by the complicated relationship so many women have with their own—their sexuality, concepts of beauty, and the experience of aging. The reality is that no two bodies are the same; for that reason, many of the pieces shared here may feel intensely personal, but they are also somehow accessible as they become about birth and death, the only universals.
We are taught that great writing is in the head, not the body, that to embody writing is to fill it with shame and mess and complication. Perhaps it would be easier to focus on some Platonic ideal of humanity, rational and infinitely controllable—that which only bleeds when dramatically appropriate, makes love to keep the reader titillated, and exists to be molded to the authorial will. However, rejecting this model breaks authors free to share the focus between the “out there” and the “in here” of our core reaction to ourselves and our experiences—wrinkles and all.
Cinderella Dream at Ten
1:1 (1976)
Each night under the tree the same wolf
waits for The Beauty to fall
down into the gravel circle the children
draw each day for marbles:
gravel fine as salt: when it’s ground
into your knees you have to
let it work itself out.
Each night under the tree the same
wolf waits and no one
is around to save
The Beauty waiting alone inside
her flowing yellow hair with the wolf
snapping at her
plain blue skirts draped gracefully over
the lowest branch
skirts the mice her only real
friends will trim with ribbons
lace scraps her wicked
step-sisters don’t need.
So there’s no question: each night you
in your father’s car
(your father driving)
drive past the playground, your heart
in your knees even before
you see her
(in the tree where she always is)
throw open the door, hurry her
into the seat beside
you hurry to slam the door on
the wolf
who is
already gobbling down
(as you knew he would, painlessly)
your legs
from toes
to knees, walking you up right
at the hemline of your own short skirt
knowing it’s happened before, knowing your
toes are still there, not to
cry out, knowing
It’s after all the price you pay
for Beauty.
Coupled
1:1 (1976)
They are married. An insect
pinned to the center of her eye,
his image writhes. Swinging open
and shut like the sky
on its hinges she has whittled
stars from his breastbone and placed
them over her sleepless
lids. A rumor spread by the moon,
a ghost who walks electric in her veins
crooning over and over
his name. An incessant rosary.
A handful of rice, whispers and lies.
Her bones hum. A falcon
tied to her prey she stitches
his shadow under her own and rides.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
1:1 (1976)
You come to life in my hands!
I am the Lady Midas
reclaiming my inheritance.
My touch undoes
the alchemy that froze
your golden bones.
A statue, you live and move
beneath my fingertips.
A charmed serpent, you unwind
inside my veins.
We thrive together, pale lichen
tentacle to bark.
Blue as the skin on a newborn
skull, the pool of
your breath floats in my palm.
We are one.
The idea of anything perfect
begins all over again.
At The Party
Women and Aging (1986)
The women over fifty
are convex from collarbone to crotch,
scarred armor nobly curved.
Their eyes look out from lines
through you, like the eyes of lions.
Unexpectant, unforgiving, calm,
they can eat children.
They eat celery and make smalltalk.
Sometimes when they touch each other’s arms
they weep for a moment.
The Idea of Making Love
Women and Aging (1986)
The idea of making love as sticking your tongue
into the calyx of the other & licking up
its nectar while being licked oneself we
love this because we are always manufacturing
nectar and when someone sticks a pointy tongue
into us and takes a drop on the tongue-tip and
swallows it we make more nectar we can always
make more of our own nectar and
are always thirsty for the nectar of others
The Crone I Will Become
14:3 (1993)
I sometimes think the crone I will become
will miss this blood, this mess, the dear skins
I cradle and soap, these little daughters.
I hoard gifts for her, that wrinkled, dry-
wombed hag, collect trinkets
and pictures, souvenirs
of this fat time. She
hardly cares. Even now I sometimes
glimpse her: Fiercer than any maiden, she stands
unchanging beneath the harvest moon. A black
wind streams her hair, her daughters are grown
and gone, beloved, unnecessary. Her life
is her own, my souvenirs are dead scraps
scuttling in a wilder wind.
Boning
21:1 (2003)
—To Will
At seventeen, he has fallen
flat-on-the-face, out-
for-the-count in love.
The food we buy languishes
in the pantry, dies inside
the fridge. For all we know,
he’s surviving on tulips,
or alder pollen. To think,
he says, I used to hate this place…
We shake our heads.
She was born here! This makes
the nettles worthy of worship.
At night, propping the phone
on the bed, he sings her
the country-western songs he
writes for her, the kind
with no heartbreak. Fifteen,
inside her ribcage nestles
a surprising bird from a bluegrass
hill, and fast-moving brooks,
and morning fragrances. This dimpled
marvel, the guile of dew.
So when his far-off friend
asks him, “Are you boning
her yet?”, something
hard and edgy hits against
a crystalline place of his,
all of a sudden a gossamer
of cracked glass.
More than two hundred bones
utterly in love with her,
more tissue, white cells, dendrites
than he could count. The marrow
of each bone lit with hunger,
blue with joy. The little spaces
within the marrow of the bones
tunneled by the wild chinooks
of what she brings.
Nobody tells him where biology
and language will collide.
What he knows in his bones today
is his to keep. A man, he chooses
not to grandstand; his steady voice
replies, “No. It’s not
like that.”
Magnificat
20:3 (2007)
Mama says, “The good Lord giveth and He will taketh away.” She says this is the taketh—this swollen belly, too big to hide anymore and bursting under my blouse buttons. “God Almighty, child!” Mama screams at me. She screams because I’ve gone and gave it away—my blessing—my blessing ...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Epigraph
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
- Part 4
- About CALYX
- About the Authors
- Ooligan Press
- Copyright