Category: #marriage
SMITTEN Review: For the love of women and reading — When Women Inspire
Recently I was gifted with an advance copy of the poetry anthology SMITTEN. I was intrigued upon hearing that all of the poems had one theme: the exploration of love between women. 46 more words
via SMITTEN Review: For the love of women and reading — When Women Inspire
Thank you so much to Christy Birmingham of http://www.whenwomeninspire.com for this incredible review of SMITTEN due out Fall, 2019. Please read the full review and consider following http://www.whenwomeninspire.com as it’s an incredible site and Christy is a remarkable woman.
What kind of lesbian would I be if I were born today?
I see your pictures on social media
a part of me is envious
of your freedom
even though women many years before
either of us
had absolutely no freedom and only those
with enough money could consider taking
a woman as their lover
it is hard to imagine
each generation I suspect
forgets the sacrifices of the last
cannot envision a time when
it was illegal to love
my experience was never that awful
I had freedoms many women still do not possess
and I am grateful for that
but sometimes when I see your
youthful face and the grace with which you accept love
how natural and easy it feels
I recall how I began
hiding in dark bars, trying to fit in, failing
never one to play endless games of poker face
I didn’t fit in with my own kind then
but if I’d been you
born in the sun with your turquoise eyes like the Donovan song
I might have had on my arm
a whole host of dreams and not
dabbled in boys for a few futile and unhappy years or
felt I couldn’t have had children and let
my fear and my constraint decide for me
the future
you are the age my daughter might be
and I would like to think I’d have
done all you have done had I been born
in a time of greater acceptance where
women who love women can grow their hair
and not have to cling to stereotypes or subterfuge
carrying knots of shame and confusion
like blankets never stretched out and slept on
I would have gotten a tattoo and maybe
been less shy and apologetic
I remember at 18 that’s all I seemed to do
sorry to my family for not having turned out straight
sorry to my friends for being the odd one out
sorry to the gays on the march who thought
with my dresses and my long tresses I was a weekend
lesbian
if they only knew
what it took and what I sacrificed
maybe they understand now
but we’re all a little older and
you don’t recapture what you felt at 18
you remember it like a language
I spoke the language of trial and error
I suspect you speak the language of love
just a little freer
so forgive me if I envy you as you walk past me
hand in hand, laughing, the edges of your hair
hitting your waist
like a Summer tidal wave.
SMITTEN – This is What Love Looks Like – Poetry by women for women – an anthology of poetry published by Indie Blu(e) will be out OCTOBER 2019 and available through all good book sellers. Please consider following SMITTEN’s FB page at https://www.facebook.com/SMITTENwomen/
If you are interested in supporting this project in any way please contact me @ candicedaquin@gmail.com. All LGBTQ projects are a little more challenging to succeed and we want the 120_+ poets who have work in SMITTEN to be read by many! Indie Blu(e) and their submissions rules can be found at www.indieblu.net
Kristiana Reed’s pre-print review of SMITTEN
Thank you to the incredible Kristiana Reed for this advance review of SMITTEN, Indie Blu(e)’s latest poetry anthology which will be published this Fall.
Candice Daquin and the editors at Indie Blu(e) Publishing have worked their magic once more in raising a powerful chorus of voices.
Daquin is a woman who has always sought to empower others from the first moment I became acquainted with her work and her nature. I also cannot think of a better person and writer to spearhead a body of work which celebrates love between two women.
The writers and styles within this collection, which Daquin has woven seamlessly together, are varied – eclectic and powerful yet with the same, strong undercurrent coursing through every piece that this is what love looks like.
It is possible people will read the sub-heading of SMITTEN and assume this is an exclusive collection; only accessible if you are woman who loves or has loved a woman. But, what is truly wonderful is this isn’t true at all. Instead, SMITTEN holds and nurtures love poems to be read and enjoyed by anyone. After all, for centuries, we have consumed and enjoyed love poems written about women, by men. Why should the fact that the poet is a woman cause the response to be any different?
‘Testimony’ by Carolyn Martin is one of the best examples of this. The nature of love and relationships does not suddenly change if it is not heterosexual; the essence of loving someone beyond belief even on the days they annoy you to distraction, remains.
However, even though SMITTEN is not exclusive, it must be recognised as an anthology paving a new way for literature. All of the writers are female and all of the subject matter is female, lesbian, bisexual and more. Pieces such as ‘Lesbian’ by Avital Abraham and ‘Pulse’ by Melissa Fadul drive home why Daquin’s decision to create a collection like this is needed and welcomed.
Too often we sideline LGBTQ+ work as a genre of its own, when it should be mainstream; literary works which are written by people to be enjoyed by people, no matter what their race, sexuality, gender and/or religion.
Yet, until this happens, I applaud Daquin and Indie Blu(e) Publishing for brazenly making a stand. Until labels are but words and not identifiers, it is important that writers like those in this collection share their voices and stories, ever-lasting love and heartbreak, and their hopes and fears, to remind the literary world they will be heard, no matter what the response may be.
Kristiana Reed August, 2019.
SMITTEN will be available this Fall via all good book sellers. For bulk orders, ARC copies or more information please contact Candice Daquin or Indie Blu(e) directly or go to the SMITTEN Facebook website
Want & Ritual
I grew up fetishizing
the nubile antonyms of beauty
Helmut Newton’s exploitation
penis behind camera stroking
sloe-eyed girls with tired mouths
smoking yellow papered Gauloises
nipples grazing peach crinoline
men’s eyes like dry stones, seeking squeezing
I grew up thinking
contortion and bondage was
an art form not
excuse for masochism
as unsupervised child, I’d look through
graphic design manuals
that inexplicably had vulvas and
perky breasts
to illustrate Pantone
it was after all
the seventies
what did I know? Except
women on beaches without tops
giving me francs for not spilling their dirty martini’s
Mon sucre d’orge, sois gentil, va me chercher mes cigarettes
always gentleman watching
the rise and fall of female throats
nicotine mouths, stained vermillion
long tan legs swept beneath chiffon
men taking them to hotel rooms
children
smoking the leftovers whilst adults
fucked behind closed doors
wondering
when I grow up
how can I lie beneath
a girl whose sweat glistens
like marzipan
and if she should
sip on me I think I’d scream
all my silver bracelets falling off
like metal flowers on hotel carpet
after all
life is a film
where we tie ourselves up
with want and ritual
debris of the unsaid
Once
the storm
predicted and prepared for
still
blew away the thatch of your house
sent water pouring like words with lament
and whilst
i was sickening
i thought I heard you row
across the expanse of us
holding your roof as umbrella
your feet bare and needy
opened my cabinet of questions
gave you a draft of why?
to which you descended beneath brackish waters
places submerged in lost question
claiming to surface
a moment where you spun in orange pekoe light
sitting stroking Gato before he
tested his claws on a tree the buyers tore down years hence
i climbed that tree in my high heels
you took a photo aping for the camera
and one fixing your sink in mini skirt
that’s my girl you said
we bathed because then you had a bath and I had heated arms to wrap you whole
the ocean of the past drawing in and receding
with it, debris of unsaid and unchained
time behind and unrecoverable
…
Once
i told you I was sick and couldn’t swim
you held me above waves with your will
till you decided I weighed too heavy
on the stitch of your skin to keep
we both
and neither of us
strangers and familiar
deciding and without decision
lost that year to the storm
as it set its pulse on our sundial and drank all hope in its spiraling eye
(there are many forms of love, you chose certainty over depth)
and once
i took a raft made of need and dragged the silty water
searching for what was lost
of us
who we were and were not
for you told fate you never knew me after all
an error of thinking … no more
then the storm left and all we knew was flat and broken
even trees we climbed were crushed like sad-faced dolls
as if an avalanche had glossed over the details
leaving behind a shiny surface and no more beneath
but dull reflection
Evermore
Do you feel me touching you through time?
Gentle the light shines on worn wooden board
Where you dance unseen
Yet I have always been, closer for holding in my heart, your motion
Through the filament of hours, our bond unbreakable
You … as long as you breathe and afterward too
Shall ever feel me standing, holding you up
Not the string pulling you to act
I am instead, arms supporting your effort
To Slough off the grief and find surity in one heart
In this ransacked world we call ours, you are home
You are the northern star
You burn behind my eyelids when they are shut
You tattoo your pigment into mine
We are woven together throughout time
When I reach, you leap, light as startled spring deer
Joining beneath the shade of night, mixed into each other’s color
I know nothing of being without you
For all of myself began
The day I saw you turn
And smile with knowing
You
Who is dearest
Shall never long for nurture or companion
I am the locket around your neck
I sleep in your dreams guarding yet
Any that may hurt you, let them try
For you are
My celestial bride
No distance or passing shall thwart
Energy recognized, even in death
Behind you I shall evermore walk
Safe ascent
This unspoiled place
holds a silence and a sound both
in the careen of wild bird, dove-tailing against light
swish tailed-fox, caught in glimpsing treeline, scar of russet
your wool pulled and caught like thoughts on wire
I felt you inside, like mercury, descending to places I’d locked
tight against battering fists and claim
how did you learn the maze and possess
parts of me I had yet to give permission?
though all of us are like the wool, caught and fluttering
against a world of happen-chance and calamity
it is only perhaps, in those untethered moments
love, unexplained by all things
captures in unguarded step
drowning tightly held belief
we are our own master
and in this yield
in your arms and the void calling overhead
a vast sky holds swell of rain
just long enough
for our safe ascent
Beneath your coat
Losing your mind feels like
Slipping your chaffed hands into a pair of rubber gloves
Plunging them into hot washing up water
Hearing the chink of porcelain, knocking against glass
Impossibly fragile.
Soon the water grows murky
You cannot see, nor reach the bottom
From the top of your head to the ache in your feet
Standing wooden, bones imploring, knitted sweater itching corner of your cheek
Passion in contrast, hot freedom, dusty legs slightly parted, cold between
An urge as you stand beside the sink
To dive in
Silent impulse on a cold day to keep your hands deep
As long as the water stays hot
That feeling when most of you is dry and clothed, but part
Is submerged in warmth, feeling like fingers working their way up
Stockings, underwear, the electric wire beneath wool
Into the mirage of your longing to let go, absolve yourself of .. it all
If you could release, lie back in kneeding waves
You might let your weary cracked elbows
Then shoulders, sopping, sink beneath
Climbing into the sink, patent shoes slipping
Brassiere faded by multiple wear, a grey strap, a bulge of apricot breast
Hair loose and dripping, reflecting against dull tin
A buttoned up woman trying to gain admittance
All thoughts stewing in your head like vegetables boiled in water lose
Their flavor …
As politely you wash and rinse, checking against light for water spots
No one shall ever know, the devouring urge beneath your coat
Who shall love?
If you are not a beautiful creature
Is there love for you?
When the world appears bewitched by youth and eternal moment’s boiled to infuse
Who shall love?
Who shall love?
The imperfect and technically “past it”
When beautiful felt like;
The sound of heals clicking on marble
Then slippers
Then bare feet
Then silence
No attention for a certain shape, age, gaze
Consolation crows, grow your mind
Crack jokes
Have a sense of humor
Laugh at yourself.
Long before, boys fell in love with me first;
Because of an hourglass
A firmness
A tightness
A willingness
The measure of hips
And then later, aserbic wit
I say ignore the rules
Climb trees at sixty, chomping on cigar
Wear polkadots, rolling dice on roof tops
Make love in bramble hedges and countertops
We talk of politics and deep sea diving, the need for conscience, passion and chocolate biscuits
You didn’t need a perfect pair of legs or a tiny waist
Eventually you wanted a woman of four seasons
Who couldn’t hold her alcohol anymore and streaked across the lawn
A girl of seventy and four, mayflies buzzing in our ears
Who still beat you at arm wrestling and sang like an angel with grey hair
Opening her robe to your eager devour
For once upon, you were a youthful coward, chasing empty smiles
And now you lay in a woman’s arms marveling at her lines
The black and blue, and those she fought hard for, birthing children
Crossing her face like stars
More beautiful for their dance
On skin long past its prime and so fine
For a constellation is music over time
Then and only then, love breathes eternal
TheFeatheredSleep 