Kindness & Karma
Kindness & Karma is a special reader space. This is one of the pages where readers can send their personal stories, unique experiences and photos. Each month the editors solicit responses from our readers to questions that embrace unexpected inspiration. Please send along your name (last name is optional) and state or country. (Editors reserve the right to edit for content and word count.)
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The Sanctuary Team wants to know...
Emerging & Professional Poets Alike:
We're still collecting poems about women's empowerment through April 10th. We will share your poem here and our editors
will select their favorite submission to be published in POETRY CORNER mid month.
WRITE TO US!
We're still collecting poems about women's empowerment through April 10th. We will share your poem here and our editors
will select their favorite submission to be published in POETRY CORNER mid month.
WRITE TO US!
Reader responses will be collected through April 10th.
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The Feminine Voice
By Victoria Twomey (New York) Oh how I love the women poets of the past,
their voices set free from the closet of time – heart songs sent forward through a crack in the door, filled with the thoughts that must have paced to and fro in the suffocating prison of position, when no one could abide their earthly yearnings, written with a tactile tongue – words woven like violet vines around the warm flesh of belly and breastbone, their thoughts burning the page like molten gold. It seems so often these women were waiting – for men to return from the cruelty of war so they could tend their bodies, maimed and broken like crushed marionettes tossed aside by a puppeteer, waiting for men to return from far-off journeys, as they peered out of windows, caressing silken curtains, waiting in doorways for the sound of the postman, or on rooftops, searching the sea for signs of a ship. An audience of women, all looking at a stage, watching seasons and affections change, as they penned their loneliness and drank their sadness like ink. They wrote with wisdom – from Italy, Senegal and America, from France, China and England, all on the same road to the same death, as they were abandoned by fickle youth, their hair losing its color, becoming transparent and grey, their usefulness fading as they began the long, slow disappearance from kitchens and bedrooms, from churches and gardens, from nurseries and fields. They left behind needles and thread, pottery, scattered pearls and desires – and sepia images where they sat with perfect posture beside their husbands, with sons and daughters in their laps, eyes like black marbles, looking straight ahead as whole worlds spun around in their inner orbits. And yes, they left behind their flocks of words that now fly from reader to reader like blackbirds swirling from tree to tree at sunset. You live on my sisters, your usefulness eternal, your femininity outliving the shell of vanity, your voice is my voice, fitting me like a shadow, so close to the bone. |
Cut From the Same Cloth
By Amy Beth Acker (New Jersey) How is it that like scissors, we can
snip away the pieces of ourselves that don’t work for the world and thread-by-thread, unravel the scraps and strips we don’t want hanging off our mannequin tween bodies for the boys to see? Here we are, trying in vain to give the cool girls the appearance of sisters cast from the same mold and dressed in the same outfit in two different sizes as if what’s on the outside is what makes us belong to a family or a world. * * * I’m looking through piles of old clothes at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market. A twenty-two-year-old child who wants to fashion herself a therapist is searching for buried treasure. I hope these pants didn’t belong to someone who upon dying, left an imprint of herself in the nubby wool, clutching her identity like an overfilled Naugahyde handbag from beyond the graveyard, unwilling to share a small piece of it with me for even a moment of her eternity. * * * Under the fairy lights of a wedding tent, head tilted back in ecstasy for all to see, wrapped in smooth black silk, leaving little space for undergarments or imagination, I flow like ink in water as I get down on the dance floor. The music wants to take me with it. Knowing they’re cut from the same cloth, I grasp my daughters’ hands, pulling them with me into the cosmic revelry, unraveling ourselves over and over and over, expanding infinitely and indefinitely into the dark of night. |
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By Jaclyn C. Stevenson (Massachusetts) The guru reflects
on intrinsic costs of beauty, on gaslighting and Gucci Emanates shades of competing chemistry: powdery fragrance beds, light-to-dark swipes made earnestly For the effort is the end-game, The contours hide the truth and soften it with ring lights and greying shades of blue. signposts and sole entities.
By Shannon Ellis (Stirlingshire, Scotland) for you my legs are signposts for your
misplaced destination, for me my legs are sole entities, they sing to me at night. they accelerate for me amongst dark shadows when other legs come too close. my legs are gateways, steel doors, heavy vessels. they carry torso and torment, they grow crops harvested each day. they speak to mother nature in earth tones. i wish i understood them. my legs translate my joy in hard and softs, steps, movements, swaying languidity. |
