stephanie bryant anderson |
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Stephanie Bryant Anderson lives in Tennessee. She writes short
stories, flash fiction and poetry, and works at a local college. Most
recently her work has appeared or will appear in The Sow's Ear Poetry
Review, Full of Crow, The Red River Review, Connotation Press and
Poetry Quarterly. Her two boys are her real world.
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I remember the sleepless nights
of after the ants came to eat him
when I begged for night to plant
its teeth and sleep, but he slept
in a bed that I could not tuck in
the corners of its sheets. His life
is the breakfast I can not taste, I
the old woman he can not touch.
I pluck, I pluck the graying hairs.
This is our stain, our echo. This
is what the generations will see:
the duende drying its heart in our
spices, shaping the infinite cloud-
less sky we know into a finite thing
that grows into our emptied bed,
marks the substantial growth of
bellies. Love was the un-birth that
could not live in the womb of an
outside world. I crawled to him
inside of his dreams. And he died.
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I free the lamb from its pot and heat,
take the children from their beds,
they have slept six months.
I sang them a lullaby in October,
they have not smiled since.
He used rosemary to cover the dead smell
of the lamb as it cooked,
but the lamb marked the walls, the ceiling
and floors with his
sweet tangy meat grease fat sadness.
The children wipe the sleep from their eyes.
He ate the back left leg of the lamb.
It lay its head in my lap.
I rub his pink bare body;
I die nourishing others too.
I clean its little bone from the pot,
and throw it in the trash.
The children run outside to play.
I cry with the dead lamb.
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Her heart was born in a laundromat. Her first cry was
for household cleaners, rubber gloves, and bandannas. She
grew to collect bills like postcards, used _rupee, rand, koruny,
marks_ and _rubles_ to pay them. She had never seen these places,
or climbed their red slanting roofs. And she never would. She
never traveled far, just to the end of her mother's gravel road
on the other side of the fence that ran along the property.
She ran barefoot down by the hens, their nest-covered dishes
and folk art. Her Momma loved when they pecked her hands
for breakfast instead of her own. She ate her mother's weeds,
(weeds tangled like her children) and honeysuckles,and wore
her evening in heliotrope and wedding veils.
Her hands and knees bleeding. She was now old enough, and
young enough, to be a freshly painted woman. She renounced
womanhood. She skipped out on her mother, and learned
proper how to love a man. |
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