Volume 38, Issue 1
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readers
P.J. Powell
I was withering in the suburban dead space between New York City and Philadelphia when I first learned of the wild woman archetype, courtesy of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves. Something was wrong with me, deeply wrong, and my gut told me this book had the answer. The wild woman of Estes’s compilation knew how to nurture the garden of the self so she could share the fruits of those labors without depleting her fertile soil and going fallow. I longed for that vibrant inner and outer life, to connect with my inner wild woman so she could come into her own.
I was the living dead. My advanced degree felt meaningless. My job had dimmed my inner light and stolen my breath. Estes said, if I could gather the bones from my past and sing over them, muscles and organs would spring forth. My four-footed, wild self would become wrapped in new flesh, grow a tawny, full coat, and come trotting along beside me. But how would I know which bones to pick up? I called to my imagination a feral godmother, a personal Baba Yaga whose christening gifts were a rib plucked from her side and a promise to check on me from time to time. If I could pinpoint her cameos in my past, perhaps I would know what to reclaim.
At first, I floundered in the dusk of my memory. Movement flickered around my peripheral vision—perhaps she was dancing just then—but that could have been a sparrow. A scream pierced the night—perhaps she was singing to me—but that may have been the fox. Shine your light directly at her, and you won’t see her embodied. Pinning her down was like trying to see wind. But watch how the leaves tumble, and you’ll know the wind’s current form.
READ MORE>Ross White
& God sends a colt. The colt’s mane flows
like a river as it gallops wild through acres
of grassland. & then God commands: build
a saddle, toughen the leathers & smith the stirrups
& buckles. Secure the rigging, puncture
the cinch. From solid ivory, carve a horn whiter
than the oblivion behind closed eyes.
Lug the saddle to the post outside the corral.
& when that’s done, the colt breaks through
pasture & into the miles of woods, weaving
between trees as if to display its & nimbleness.
& the colt heeds no call, just runs & runs.
& then God chooses silence as His answer.
God chooses a butterfly, deep crimson
& erratic, to tend the excitable breeze.
No amount of waiting makes the foal submit,
nor breaks him. When the sun breathes its last
sigh over distant mountains, when like a seraphim
the woman comes from the cottage
to the hitching post with hardtack and coffee
then guides herself back by candlelight,
the colt does not buckle. When the coyote
lurches like a drunkard through the field
& past the corral, when the fireflies retire
to scrub pine. When the sun tosses out its red anger
& then its blinding yellow ache. The colt
returns from the woods, gallops through pasture,
approaches & retreats & approaches
& rears & whinnies, unrelenting to stillness,
brays like unyielding rain. Always there is
rope, but because no scripture says to tie
a loop, because God makes no command
to whip the lariat & noose the colt’s neck,
because God chooses moths to gather
like parishioners & sedge grasses to consecrate
the fields, because God chooses silence…
Now the coyote eats a chicken. At twilight,
in the cottage windows, candles flicker & dim.
The colt grows to stallion & thunders through
the field & dust rises in the horizon. In every horizon.
& if it matters to God, still He chooses to speak
in symbol. If He is speaking. If He notices
the stallion dreaming of its restless yearling hooves.
If He is even watching. If He is there at all.
Carmelinda Scian
Vivas and kisses and embraces and tiny glasses filled with port wine that glistened like blood in the December sunshine and my uncle Rafael home too soon from college proposing a toast to the up-coming woman. This is what everyone is calling me today, Mulher-futura. I’m turning twelve.
My face burns.
Twice today.
Early this morning, as my mother stirred the rice-pudding, as though the measure of her worth as wife, mother, housekeeper, and the receptacle of womanly knowledge and experience depended on it, she said, “Listen Milita, dolls and silliness have to go now, your body will soon change. It’ll sprout quickly like a beanstalk and it’ll bleed; soon you’ll need a brassiere and other things. You’ll have to watch what you say and do in front of men. You mustn’t tempt them. Men can’t help themselves; it’s always the woman who’s to blame.”
I wasn’t sure what it was I wasn’t supposed to say or do in front of men but I didn’t ask, the heat rising to my face like a sudden fever. Subtlety was never my Mother’s way. The aureola on my breasts had started enlarging and my nipples were itchy but I never said anything to anyone. How did my mother know? In the night, sometimes I touched myself. There were days when I couldn’t wait for night’s cover. This was my secret.
READ MORE>Susan Bryant is a fine art photographer. She received her BFA in painting in 1976 from Indiana University and her MFA in photography in 1978 from Indiana State University. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, where she has taught photography for the past 30 years. Her personal work includes gelatin silver prints, hand-colored silver prints, digital photographs, and most recently, the 19th century processes of daguerreotypes, tintypes and wet plate collodion negatives and positives (ambrotypes). Her work has been widely exhibited across the United States in solo and juried exhibitions. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship and is represented by The Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.
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P.J. Powell
“I was withering in the suburban dead space between New York City and Philadelphia when I first learned of the wild woman archetype, courtesy of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves.”
READ MORE>Ross White
& God sends a colt. The colt’s mane flows
like a river as it gallops wild through acres
of grassland. & then God commands: build
a saddle, toughen the leathers & smith the stirrups
& buckles. Secure the rigging, puncture
the cinch. From solid ivory, carve a horn whiter
than the oblivion behind closed eyes.
Lug the saddle to the post outside the corral.
& when that’s done, the colt breaks through
pasture & into the miles of woods, weaving
between trees as if to display its & nimbleness.
& the colt heeds no call, just runs & runs.
& then God chooses silence as His answer.
God chooses a butterfly, deep crimson
& erratic, to tend the excitable breeze.
No amount of waiting makes the foal submit,
nor breaks him. When the sun breathes its last
sigh over distant mountains, when like a seraphim
the woman comes from the cottage
to the hitching post with hardtack and coffee
then guides herself back by candlelight,
the colt does not buckle. When the coyote
lurches like a drunkard through the field
& past the corral, when the fireflies retire
to scrub pine. When the sun tosses out its red anger
& then its blinding yellow ache. The colt
returns from the woods, gallops through pasture,
approaches & retreats & approaches
& rears & whinnies, unrelenting to stillness,
brays like unyielding rain. Always there is
rope, but because no scripture says to tie
a loop, because God makes no command
to whip the lariat & noose the colt’s neck,
because God chooses moths to gather
like parishioners & sedge grasses to consecrate
the fields, because God chooses silence…
Now the coyote eats a chicken. At twilight,
in the cottage windows, candles flicker & dim.
The colt grows to stallion & thunders through
the field & dust rises in the horizon. In every horizon.
& if it matters to God, still He chooses to speak
in symbol. If He is speaking. If He notices
the stallion dreaming of its restless yearling hooves.
If He is even watching. If He is there at all.
Carmelinda Scian
Vivas and kisses and embraces and tiny glasses filled with port wine that glistened like blood in the December sunshine and my uncle Rafael home too soon from college proposing a toast to the up-coming woman. This is what everyone is calling me today, Mulher-futura. I’m turning twelve.
READ MORE>Susan Bryant is a fine art photographer. She received her BFA in painting in 1976 from Indiana University and her MFA in photography in 1978 from Indiana State University. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, where she has taught photography for the past 30 years. Her personal work includes gelatin silver prints, hand-colored silver prints, digital photographs, and most recently, the 19th century processes of daguerreotypes, tintypes and wet plate collodion negatives and positives (ambrotypes). Her work has been widely exhibited across the United States in solo and juried exhibitions. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship and is represented by The Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.
