Diane Seuss
I can't see her clearly. Can you see your mother clearly? I was concocted
in the kettle of her body. Swam like a swan in a pool of her blood. From my
earliest days I called her by her name—Norma. But inside, always mommy.
I called out to her, even when I was far from home. In High Wycombe, peeling
peaches for dinner. Not like that, a stern woman said, telling me to slip the knife
just under the skin and pull it away from the flesh. Peeing outside the Hellfire
Caves on Midsummer Night. In Scotland, sleeping in a tent on the cold ground.
So far north the sky never got dark. Arrested in Germany for stealing a mug.
Man wearing lederhosen barking at me. Veins in his face ready to explode. Forced
to eat that awful white sausage the color of an underbelly. Bad strawberries. Shitting
myself on the train from Segovia. Giving birth, cut through the gut, the layer of fat
and uterus exposed to the cold room and its attendants. And now in my solitude
which matches her solitude like mother-daughter dresses she'd disdain. Do you see
how I persist in telling you about the flowers when I mean to describe the rain?
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Photographic portrait of Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo: Opening the Heart to Justice

"In An American Sunrise, Harjo’s 16th book of poetry, released by Norton this week, she continues to bear witness to the violence encountered by Native Americans in the aftermath of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Her words express that the past, present and future are all part of the same continuous strand."

via SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

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Cover of Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems

"In a 1987 interview that appeared in the Partisan Review, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said, 'It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.' With that metaphor, we are asked to see poetry as a gauge, a measure, a tool, a way of understanding the nature of phenomenon."
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