The Habits of Hestia
There is something about a kitchen full of food
greeting you at 6 a.m. -- a greedy comfort --
the coffee pot ready to brew and a tough cut of beef
all night shift-shaping its proteins in the pickling brine,
trading secrets you thought were only shared
in your long-gone grandmothers' kitchens.
Someone else starts the assembling
of cabbage wedges, carrots, onion and oil drizzle,
sets potatoes and eggs and beets to boil
in their separate copper pots, each rumbling awake
at the same swipe of the second hand.
The family must taste this cooking-cloud in their dreams.
Your lone cup of coffee.
The radio news is companion
to sharpened knives, oven mitts and the curtain
just parted for the clover owling their faces
towards the source. This might save you,
allotting left-overs for neighbors
like a mother-in-law. The hearth-witch doesn't apologize
for her old-world stove-sauna, for setting fire
to appetites, for waking up the drowsy.
She chips the plates on purpose,
sets the table, and waits.
About the Poet
Kristin Berger lives in Portland, OR with her husband and two young children. Her poetry and essays have appeared or is forthcoming, among others, in The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Under the Sun, and online at mamazine.com, Hipmama.com and Hotmetalpress.net. "Habits of Hestia" was originally published in the anthology of Portland women writers, VoiceCatcher.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Featured Blog: The Night You Lay on A Bed of Spikes by Erica Miriam Fabri
The Night You Lay in a Bed of Spikes
It was just after every man you knew was killed in the war.
It was the same year you refused to wear widow s weeds.
You refused to jump into a fire pit, to join a man in a pile of ash.
It was a time when you should ve been growing babies,
watering them, turning their limbs
under a florescent light in the greenhouse.
But the monsoon came on cycle
and all you could remember was your mother dying:
the way she stared at little doe-eyed you,
then pressed the black metal statue of His tiny body
hard into your palm, saying: make love to Him. only to Him.
They wanted you to wear sequins for eyes.
They wanted you to duck your chin to the floor,
to put oily kisses on their curling toes.
You said No. The way a woman never said No.
No, to a lump-cut of stone. No, to a gold dress.
No, to a man. No, to a man. No, to any man but Him.
You took to the road: wrote song after radiant song.
You tramped to the Forest of Honey:
did the circle-dance with the cow-herding girls.
It went tick tick tick
as you snapped the
silver straps on your ankles,
clack clack clack
as you swung the beads
at your throat,
thump-ah thump-ah
went the clay pot of indigo
on your head
your robes snagged your nose ring,
hair knot slipped loose,
you looked like a jade, a scanty wench waltzing in the compost,
that s why they did it:
lined up the spikes in your sheets
one by one
like alloy scales on a fish s back.
You ran for the bed anyway
dove for that stretcher
no matter how the cuts would sting,
the bloody mess it was bound to make:
it was what you d been waiting for all day
what you d been kicking for, clapping for:
the room where you could be
eclipsed on the mattress
by Him.
But, just when you collapsed
the curve of your back onto the cot,
when you spread out the skin
that wrapped tight and brown
over your hips,
it was then
that He turned the razors
into rose petals:
Silly Girl, you screamed
and swirled
in the red stain
of their powder,
sweet-smelling
and slippery,
but no sharper
than a thistle.
About the Poet
Erica Miriam Fabri is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and received her MFA in poetry from The New School. She is the author of the chapbook, High Heel Magazine and her work has appeared in The Texas Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Good Foot Magazine and Paper Street. She currently teaches creative writing at The School of Visual Arts and for the City University of New York. www.ericafabri.com
It was just after every man you knew was killed in the war.
It was the same year you refused to wear widow s weeds.
You refused to jump into a fire pit, to join a man in a pile of ash.
It was a time when you should ve been growing babies,
watering them, turning their limbs
under a florescent light in the greenhouse.
But the monsoon came on cycle
and all you could remember was your mother dying:
the way she stared at little doe-eyed you,
then pressed the black metal statue of His tiny body
hard into your palm, saying: make love to Him. only to Him.
They wanted you to wear sequins for eyes.
They wanted you to duck your chin to the floor,
to put oily kisses on their curling toes.
You said No. The way a woman never said No.
No, to a lump-cut of stone. No, to a gold dress.
No, to a man. No, to a man. No, to any man but Him.
You took to the road: wrote song after radiant song.
You tramped to the Forest of Honey:
did the circle-dance with the cow-herding girls.
It went tick tick tick
as you snapped the
silver straps on your ankles,
clack clack clack
as you swung the beads
at your throat,
thump-ah thump-ah
went the clay pot of indigo
on your head
your robes snagged your nose ring,
hair knot slipped loose,
you looked like a jade, a scanty wench waltzing in the compost,
that s why they did it:
lined up the spikes in your sheets
one by one
like alloy scales on a fish s back.
You ran for the bed anyway
dove for that stretcher
no matter how the cuts would sting,
the bloody mess it was bound to make:
it was what you d been waiting for all day
what you d been kicking for, clapping for:
the room where you could be
eclipsed on the mattress
by Him.
But, just when you collapsed
the curve of your back onto the cot,
when you spread out the skin
that wrapped tight and brown
over your hips,
it was then
that He turned the razors
into rose petals:
Silly Girl, you screamed
and swirled
in the red stain
of their powder,
sweet-smelling
and slippery,
but no sharper
than a thistle.
About the Poet
Erica Miriam Fabri is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and received her MFA in poetry from The New School. She is the author of the chapbook, High Heel Magazine and her work has appeared in The Texas Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Good Foot Magazine and Paper Street. She currently teaches creative writing at The School of Visual Arts and for the City University of New York. www.ericafabri.com
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Featured Blog: Stifling by Nanette Rayman Rivera
Stifling
In this amalgamate and anomalous light
she pleasures in her body, placing herself
near the hyacinth branches, naked before
the full-length mirror, fingers shelled
around the budding globe of her belly.
It is spring and the air and mulberry congeal
by symmetry, this woman lost in the cocoonery
of mothering and the dream of the archaic
fostering of silkworms retelling her own private
status, the spring outside and in, posing as if
concentric within the other. She read
that it begins with the minuscule pearly seeds
women pour into delicate hand-sewn sachets,
hands them snug to their corseted breasts.
Women as incubators, their bodies nurturing
those nascent silkworms, waiting for the first
shoots of l amorie blanc to sprout, nourishment
assured. Placed in their own cocoonery, the
roar of their munching like a hammering monsoon
amidst a shrunken, deciduous woodland, delicious
sound, the sound a mother loves to hear, the
sound of growth, expelling all effluence, raised
to an unalloyed sheerness, clear as a ready white grape.
And you, woman, mother for a full ten days, mother
who redeploys according to need, to nurture again,
your need safely hidden and tiptoeing through
the universe as the silkworms you've birthed
have faded to nothing, like blue sky for clouds.
Medicinal light of afternoon as you remove
the cocoons from brushwood ladders, as you
steam them so the butterflies won't burst
through their shells demolishing all the fragile
spun thread, because the thread is everything.
The reward you're expecting
never comes, but the stifling does.
About the poet
Nanette Rayman Rivera lives with her husband in New York City. She graduated from New School University with a degree in Writing and Philosophy. In addition to being a writer, she is a trained actress, having studied at Circle in the Square Theatre School, The Gene Frankel Studio and The New England Shakespeare Festival. She has performed in many plays off-off Broadway, in independent films, and played a waitress four times on All My Children.
Her first poetry book from Foothills Publishing, Project: Butterflies has just been released. She has been published in The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Worcester Review, Dragonfire, MiPOesias, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pedestal, Carousel, Wicked Alice, The Pebble Lake Review, AntiMuse, Sein Und Werden, andwerve, Barnwood, The Centrifugal Eye, Words and Pictures, Her Circle, Poesia, Arsenic Lobster, Stirring, Flashquake, A Little Poetry, DMQ Review, Velvet Avalanche Anthology, Verse Libre, Erosha, Three Candles, Snow Monkey, Jack, Flutter, Small Spiral Notebook, Carve Magazine, 5 Trope, Mindfire Renewed, Grasslimb, Wanderings, Concrete Wolf, Rogue’s Scholars, remark, eye-rhyme, Central Avenue, Red River Review, Mannequin Envy, and Underground Window among others. She was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes this year: Arsenic Lobster for poetry and Dragonfire for memoir. Upcoming: Gambara, Wheelhouse, The Externalist. She is also a proofreader for Moondance Journal.
In this amalgamate and anomalous light
she pleasures in her body, placing herself
near the hyacinth branches, naked before
the full-length mirror, fingers shelled
around the budding globe of her belly.
It is spring and the air and mulberry congeal
by symmetry, this woman lost in the cocoonery
of mothering and the dream of the archaic
fostering of silkworms retelling her own private
status, the spring outside and in, posing as if
concentric within the other. She read
that it begins with the minuscule pearly seeds
women pour into delicate hand-sewn sachets,
hands them snug to their corseted breasts.
Women as incubators, their bodies nurturing
those nascent silkworms, waiting for the first
shoots of l amorie blanc to sprout, nourishment
assured. Placed in their own cocoonery, the
roar of their munching like a hammering monsoon
amidst a shrunken, deciduous woodland, delicious
sound, the sound a mother loves to hear, the
sound of growth, expelling all effluence, raised
to an unalloyed sheerness, clear as a ready white grape.
And you, woman, mother for a full ten days, mother
who redeploys according to need, to nurture again,
your need safely hidden and tiptoeing through
the universe as the silkworms you've birthed
have faded to nothing, like blue sky for clouds.
Medicinal light of afternoon as you remove
the cocoons from brushwood ladders, as you
steam them so the butterflies won't burst
through their shells demolishing all the fragile
spun thread, because the thread is everything.
The reward you're expecting
never comes, but the stifling does.
About the poet
Nanette Rayman Rivera lives with her husband in New York City. She graduated from New School University with a degree in Writing and Philosophy. In addition to being a writer, she is a trained actress, having studied at Circle in the Square Theatre School, The Gene Frankel Studio and The New England Shakespeare Festival. She has performed in many plays off-off Broadway, in independent films, and played a waitress four times on All My Children.
Her first poetry book from Foothills Publishing, Project: Butterflies has just been released. She has been published in The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Worcester Review, Dragonfire, MiPOesias, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pedestal, Carousel, Wicked Alice, The Pebble Lake Review, AntiMuse, Sein Und Werden, andwerve, Barnwood, The Centrifugal Eye, Words and Pictures, Her Circle, Poesia, Arsenic Lobster, Stirring, Flashquake, A Little Poetry, DMQ Review, Velvet Avalanche Anthology, Verse Libre, Erosha, Three Candles, Snow Monkey, Jack, Flutter, Small Spiral Notebook, Carve Magazine, 5 Trope, Mindfire Renewed, Grasslimb, Wanderings, Concrete Wolf, Rogue’s Scholars, remark, eye-rhyme, Central Avenue, Red River Review, Mannequin Envy, and Underground Window among others. She was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes this year: Arsenic Lobster for poetry and Dragonfire for memoir. Upcoming: Gambara, Wheelhouse, The Externalist. She is also a proofreader for Moondance Journal.
Celebrating National Poetry Month
One of the most difficult tasks in editing for our publication is making final selections. The job was particularly tough when working on our forthcoming Spring issue, as there were many excellent poets who submitted their work for consideration.
As a result, I'm happy to announce that April's Feature Blog Series will celebrate National Poetry Month by showcasing many of the wonderful writing talents we've seen in recent months. Hailing from places around the U.S. and abroad, these poets illuminated our discussions, leaving a mark that will not soon be forgotten.
Enjoy!
Misty K. Ericson
Publisher & Editor
As a result, I'm happy to announce that April's Feature Blog Series will celebrate National Poetry Month by showcasing many of the wonderful writing talents we've seen in recent months. Hailing from places around the U.S. and abroad, these poets illuminated our discussions, leaving a mark that will not soon be forgotten.
Enjoy!
Misty K. Ericson
Publisher & Editor
Monday, March 5, 2007
Submit your book for a review
We are currently reviewing selections for the New and Recent Titles book review section of our Spring issue.
To be eligible for a review in HCE, the title must be authored by a woman, have a release date on or after January 2007, and cover a theme relevent to women and cross-cultural issues. Fiction and non-fiction works are desired.
To be considered for a review, please forward review copies to:
Books Editor
Her Circle Ezine
335 Cherry
Wyandotte, MI 48192
Deadline for review copies is April 30th.
To be eligible for a review in HCE, the title must be authored by a woman, have a release date on or after January 2007, and cover a theme relevent to women and cross-cultural issues. Fiction and non-fiction works are desired.
To be considered for a review, please forward review copies to:
Books Editor
Her Circle Ezine
335 Cherry
Wyandotte, MI 48192
Deadline for review copies is April 30th.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Featured Blog: A Review of Autobiography of My Mother by Jamiaca Kincaid
Jamiaca Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother is a reflection on dispossession and how it relates to motherhood. Xuela Claudette Richardson narrates her life story, and that of her father's and her mother's history as she understands it. Xuela's Caribbean mother died while delivering Xuela in childbirth. This loss deeply affects Xuela's life. Her half-Scottish half-African father is a criminal who is widely feared in her community. He sends Xuela to be raised by a woman who cleans his clothes, Ma Eunice. Xuela illustrates, "Ma Eunice was not unkind: she treated me just the way she treated her own children – but this is not to say she was kind to her own children. In a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given." Xuela is miserable and feels hopeless in Ma Eunice's home until her father is given letters that Xuela had written privately about her situation, without the intention to send the letters. Xuela's writing saves her from one form of life void of love or emotion only to bring her to another that is equally crippling. Xuela eventually turns into herself, a habit she continues unto her death.
Xuela relates the experience of dispossession to the loss of her mother. She expresses regret that while she was developing into a woman, she did not have someone to comfort her, to give her meaning, or encourage her in her pursuits. Her father, who is represented as the new, foreign land of the conqueror, does not know her and is not interested in knowing her. As a result, Xuela feels apathetic about the people surrounding her, even her lovers. She chooses not to bear children. Her life ends as it began, with emptiness, loss, and indifference.
Autobiography of My Mother gives a succinct expression of the experience of dispossession. The reader sees the world through Xuela's eyes, an intelligent and beautiful woman who deeply senses her lack of history or home. The theme of motherhood as the anchor of identity and passion echoes throughout the reading.
Review by Kellie Roblin
Xuela relates the experience of dispossession to the loss of her mother. She expresses regret that while she was developing into a woman, she did not have someone to comfort her, to give her meaning, or encourage her in her pursuits. Her father, who is represented as the new, foreign land of the conqueror, does not know her and is not interested in knowing her. As a result, Xuela feels apathetic about the people surrounding her, even her lovers. She chooses not to bear children. Her life ends as it began, with emptiness, loss, and indifference.
Autobiography of My Mother gives a succinct expression of the experience of dispossession. The reader sees the world through Xuela's eyes, an intelligent and beautiful woman who deeply senses her lack of history or home. The theme of motherhood as the anchor of identity and passion echoes throughout the reading.
Review by Kellie Roblin
Friday, February 23, 2007
Featured Blog: A Review of Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Breath, Eyes, Memory is a quietly written novel that nonetheless comes off as lavish. It’s the story of Sophie Caco, who until the age of twelve lives in a small village in Haiti, then is transported to New York City to be with her mother. The usual painful growing up events transpire—a falling out with her mother, marriage, a baby—after which Sophie feels the need to return to Haiti, not even sure what she’s looking for.
What she finds is her aunt Atie, who raised her until her departure, her grandmother, a host of stories, and closure with her mother. Information about her personal past as well as the collective past of the village is communicated through stories, and the novel is doused with such stories, especially about girls and women—a girl who wants to marry a star, a woman who kills men after she sleeps with them, a woman who bleeds so much she must give up being a human and turns into a butterfly, a woman who is killed by her husband for flying without her skin at night. Sophie’s grandmother tells a story about a girl who is tempted with pomegranates by a lark, and tricks him out of taking her across the sea, where her heart will be taken by a king. In Danticat’s world, women are bonded to each other through these stories.
Sophie’s mother comes to Haiti to take her back to her husband in New York City, and in the process they both confront their pasts and make amends. Their pasts include the richness, the beauty, but also the political turmoil of their homeland, “where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head.”
Review by Elizabeth Crachiolo
What she finds is her aunt Atie, who raised her until her departure, her grandmother, a host of stories, and closure with her mother. Information about her personal past as well as the collective past of the village is communicated through stories, and the novel is doused with such stories, especially about girls and women—a girl who wants to marry a star, a woman who kills men after she sleeps with them, a woman who bleeds so much she must give up being a human and turns into a butterfly, a woman who is killed by her husband for flying without her skin at night. Sophie’s grandmother tells a story about a girl who is tempted with pomegranates by a lark, and tricks him out of taking her across the sea, where her heart will be taken by a king. In Danticat’s world, women are bonded to each other through these stories.
Sophie’s mother comes to Haiti to take her back to her husband in New York City, and in the process they both confront their pasts and make amends. Their pasts include the richness, the beauty, but also the political turmoil of their homeland, “where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head.”
Review by Elizabeth Crachiolo
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