Poet's Ink Review

March 2009

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An Elegy to My Abdomen (In Memory of Anne Sexton’s “In Celebration of my Uterus”)

More is less
She stands before the full-length glass
Sucking in her gut
Searching for that hollow cave
Whose boundaries were the rib cage
And two sturdy pelvic bones

It reminds her of a window
You know the sort
The ones with cracked panes
And flaky grey paint

Or that can of imported Brie
Her son’s future father-in-law blessed her with
The one whose lid exploded
Released an odor that insulted the air
Like the remains of last week’s experiment
In Chem 101

It used to be a real kick
To pinch it
And get a low yield
Now the return on her investment
Is rich indeed
A spiraling dividend

Rolls and fistfuls
Of flesh
That feel like giant doughnuts
Left at yesterday’s coffee break
Not time yet
To summon the mourners
Rehearse the dirge
Contact the crematorium
Or Your Friendly Embalmer
Not yet—but soon.

Suzanne Richardson Harvey

Suzanne lectured at Stanford University in Northern California for almost two decades. She received her doctorate in Elizabethan poetry, that of Edmund Spenser, from Tufts University in the Boston area. Her poetry has appeared before in Poet’s Ink as well as in The Christian Science Monitor, Concho River Review, Ascent Aspirations Magazine (Canada), nthposition (UK), and Current Accounts (UK), among other venues.

If you insist on sitting in the back row,
Why go to the opera? If you get stuck there —
Fine, that’s just the luck of the draw, but
Don’t say you’ll never need to see any better.

When the dark beer and sauerbraten arrive,
Dig in. Don’t complain that there’s no sauerkraut.
Just give the waitress her tip
And tell her you love her.

Das schöne Madchen? — Oh, it has gone
To the opera. Accompany her there, and sit where she wants.
Pay no attention at all to Mephisto’s
Her zu mir!

I don’t know much, but one thing
I’m sure of: There are more women in God’s heaven
Than men, and more women in man’s hell
Than gods.

Eric Luft

De temps en temps I dream in Greek.
deinê de klaggê genet’ argureoio bioio.

Silver women overflow the walls,
Merging around me, jellied screaming stalagmites;
“And terrible came the clang of his silver bow”
With Cassandra’s voice.

Brazen demons leap to strife,
Hurling toward a marriage they cannot consummate;
Yet in paeans they carouse, delighting in venery,
Outrage for a woman.

Rigid men cascade over the walls
As once they did from out the treasured box
When Pandora thrust the seized Hope between her legs
And prayed.

Insulted, jaded Helen waits for nothing.
Female life, male death: to her the choice is light.
She sleeps as Greek and Trojan each grab a labium
And tug.

“And terrible came the clang of his silver bow,” his own,
As Hope shattered.

Eric Luft

Eric, after a lifetime of teaching philosophy and curating rare books, has become "gainfully unemployed." He is listed in Who's Who in America.

Three women in an office
punch their calculators after lunch,
more concerned with calories
than balancing bills.
All of them middle-aged mothers,
one a young grandmother.
Proud of what they’ve done in life,
not yet satisfied with themselves,
or the total on their tiny screens.

The secretary comes in from her lunch break
with a smile and an armload of cookies to share.
Younger than some of their daughters,
she’s slim, and vibrant.
They turn down her good-natured offering,
afraid of the bathroom scales at home.

Their manager comes in to deliver some papers.
He looks at the secretary, and no one else.
He smiles, politely, sincerely.
Then, in front of them all,
He asks, “Have you lost weight?”

Erin Stocum

Kneeling at the altar
of motherhood
making my sacrifice—
parties, privacy, quiet
transatlantic flights, and romance
flooding from the throat
of my thirties like blood
from a heifer—
I yet bear in my heart
a small ember
of rebellion, a longing
to somehow save the fatted calf.
I bow my head to hide it
I raise my hands.
The priest and priestess
in vestments of Simba and Elmo
do not notice my reticence,
but take the everything I give
with noisy gulps and shrieks of pleasure
totality of acceptance.
Is it this how easy
it is to get into heaven?

Heidi Kenyon

Insight

Soft sounds filter
through silence after bedtime:
the door breathes open
my son stands shyly in his Daddy's shirt.

I start to scold him back
to bed, but he knows the code:
"I want to cuddle."
I pull him to my lap instead.
His legs fold like tent poles.
This child who dashes,
dances, shrieks, prances
melts now with such ease,
limp and fetal
slack like bread dough.

I slide down the slick bank of quiet,
into the stream of night noises,
his breathing, fridge humming,
elastic tick of the clock, stretching time.
His lips parting to speak make a moist
noise, his still-baby voice slow with sleep.
"You know," he says,
and I jerk awake, jarred
"Sometimes stars fill up our mouths,
and we can't talk."

Heidi Kenyon

Heidi is the retired co-founder of a cooking school, a former editor at the University of Idaho Press, a member of the Internet Writers' Workshop and Zeugma Poetry Workshop, and the mother of three. She has a B.A. in English and lives in Seattle, Washington. Her work has recently appeared in Camroc Press Review and cc&d magazine.