CORO DOS ÓRFÃOS

Nós, órfãos,
Queixamo-nos do mundo:
Deceparam nosso ramo
E lançaram-no ao fogo –
Transformaram em lenha quem nos protegia –
Nós, órfãos, jazemos nos campos da solidão.
Nós, órfãos,
Queixamo-nos do mundo:
Na noite nossos pais brincam conosco de esconde-esconde –
Por detrás das negras dobras da noite
Fitam-nos seus rostos,
Falam suas bocas:
Fomos lenha seca na mão de um lenhador –
Mas nossos olhos tornaram-se olhos de anjos
E olham para vós,
Por entre as negras dobras da noite
Eles olham –

Nós, órfãos,
Queixamo-nos do mundo:
Pedras tornaram-se nosso brinquedo,
Pedras têm rostos, rostos de pai e mãe,
Não murcham como flores, não mordem como bichos –
E não ardem como lenha seca quando lançadas no forno –
Nós, órfãos, queixamo-nos do mundo:
Mundo por que nos tiraste as ternas mães
E os pais que dizem: Tu te pareces comigo!
Nós, órfãos, não nos parecemos com ninguém mais no mundo!
Ó Mundo,
Nós te acusamos!

Nelly Sachs, German–Swedish poet

EM MEU QUARTO

Em meu quarto,
onde fica minha cama
uma mesa uma cadeira
o fogão
o universo está ajoelhado como em toda parte
para ser salvo
da invisibilidade –
Eu traço uma linha
escrevo o alfabeto
pinto o lema suicida na parede
de onde brotam imediatamente os renascimentos
já prendo as constelações à verdade
então a terra começa a martelar
a noite se afrouxa
desprende-se
dente morto da dentadura –

Nelly Sachs, German–Swedish poet

Burden Of Life

A VÓS, QUE CONSTRUÍS A NOVA MORADA

Há pedras como almas.

Rabbi Nachman

Quando levantares de novo tuas paredes –
Fogão, catre, mesa e cadeira –
Não os enfeites com tuas lágrimas, os que partiram
Que não mais habitarão contigo
Na pedra
Nem na madeira –
Senão haverá choro no teu sono
No curto sono que ainda tens de dormir.
Não suspires ao estenderes teu lençol –
Senão misturam-se teus sonhos
Com o suor dos mortos.
Ah, paredes e utensílios
São sensíveis como harpas eólicas
E como um campo onde viceja tua dor,
E sentem o que em ti é parente do pó.
Constrói enquanto escorre a clepsidra
Mas não chores os minutos que correm
Junto com o pó
Que encobre a luz.

Nelly Sachs, German–Swedish poet

 Façanhas da memória

Há uma casa,
uma casa
que fechou
suas portas.
Foi
morrendo
em nome
e graça
da mesmíssima
vida.
Esta casa
abandonou
o salão
solenemente,
sem deixar
fotografias,
nem fantasmas
cochilando
por aí
pelas escadas;
nem sequer
um resplendor
de vozes
se gestando
nos quartos
de serviço
ofendidas na sombra
chorando
seu direito
à memória

Esta casa
onde não há
antepassados
escalando
o tempo,
enredando
parentes
terra
adentro
onde vão se
s o m a n d o.

Tardança

Foram juntando
palavras intencionadas

uma
a
uma
iam entrando

pela fissura da porta
onde aparecem cartas

algumas vezes
quando a casa
está
desabitada.

Teresa Calderón (Causas perdidas, 1984)

Exílio

I.
Ontem te chamei
e minha própria sombra
respondeu no telefone

II.
Adeus eu disse docemente
e a rua cresceu cresceu
como a noite

III.
Seu corpo luta na parede.
Meu quarto
não pode te deixar ir
sem me ferir

IV.
Fantasma tresnoitado do amanhecer
cantando seu próprio tango
de pé chorando
sobre o balcão de uma mulher
também fantasma.

Roteiro dos desaparecidos

Reconstruir a luz para os que nunca mais a verão
        a luz que nasce deles
       asilada luz permanecente no
    sótão da visão
  desaparecida
riscada
é o roteiro reconstituído dessa morte
não de todo vivida
porque volta inconclusa a aparecer
       a vigiar a vida de longe.

Roteiro do pensamento invertido na faceta subliminar
à margem de qualquer quimera subvertida

Roteiro desse sótão e sua persistência
escura
quando a cidade virada em seu próprio ofertório
se converte em santuário

Onde emergem os mortos resplandecentes

Pelo brilho ameaçante dos cactos
seus olhos veem os vivos lascivamente.

Mas há mais: eles colocam grandes placas de vidro
opacas
para resistir ao cruzamento dos edifícios
sem defesa.
Desafiando a cor do sol
com seu penetrante verde subterrâneo
inundam a cidade.
Cresce então sua antiga primavera
na qual os vivos submergem como num sonho
implacável.

Eugenia Brito (Vía pública, 1984)

''evocação da dor da memória do Holocausto''

Beth Gibbons / Penderecki / Górecki - Symphony No. 3 Final Movement

'' as dores de alma na voz de Beth Gibbons''

'' transformar sofrimento em arte''

"Asas Elétricas"

Aprendei, mortais, a buscar as coisas do céu

Exposição Mariajosé Gallardo

                                  Woman with Large Plate (Francesca Woodman), 1978

filharada

Mazzy Star - Look On Down From The Bridge

Happy Birthday Old Girl

 ANIVERSÁRIO

(Excerto)

No tempo em que festejavam o dia dos meus anos,
Eu era feliz e ninguém estava morto.
Na casa antiga, até eu fazer anos era uma tradição de há séculos,
E a alegria de todos, e a minha, estava certa com uma religião qualquer.

No tempo em que festejavam o dia dos meus anos,
Eu tinha a grande saúde de não perceber coisa nenhuma,
De ser inteligente para entre a família,
E de não ter as esperanças que os outros tinham por mim.
Quando vim a ter esperanças, já não sabia ter esperanças.
Quando vim a olhar para a vida, perdera o sentido da vida.

(…)

O que eu sou hoje é como a umidade no corredor do fim da casa,
Pondo grelado nas paredes…
O que eu sou hoje (e a casa dos que me amaram treme através das minhas
lágrimas),
O que eu sou hoje é terem vendido a casa,
É terem morrido todos,
É estar eu sobrevivente a mim-mesmo como um fósforo frio…

No tempo em que festejavam o dia dos meus anos…
Que meu amor, como uma pessoa, esse tempo!
Desejo físico da alma de se encontrar ali outra vez,
Por uma viagem metafísica e carnal,
Com uma dualidade de eu para mim…
Comer o passado como pão de fome, sem tempo de manteiga nos dentes!

Vejo tudo outra vez com uma nitidez que me cega para o que há aqui…
A mesa posta com mais lugares, com melhores desenhos na loiça, com mais copos,
O aparador com muitas coisas — doces, frutas, o resto na sombra debaixo do alçado —,
As tias velhas, os primos diferentes, e tudo era por minha causa,
No tempo em que festejavam o dia dos meus anos…

(…)

Poesias dos Outros Eus. Álvaro de Campos

''as amendoeiras nos ranchos folclóricos ou nos carros tradicionais''

microagressões

Batom de Romã

Visions Of A Life

À SEGUNDA VEZ QUE SE NASCE, ASSISTE-SE 

AO PRÓPRIO NASCIMENTO

 José Almada Negreiros. Nome de Guerra. Livros RTP. Editorial Verbo. p. 37

'' a idade moral dos outros''

 José Almada Negreiros. Nome de Guerra. Livros RTP. Editorial Verbo. p. 34

 « mas não foi assim, e ele continuou descalço;
e a tosse piorou; passados mais três dias,
custou-lhe a levantar-se;
não queria, mas os vizinhos fizeram-no ir ao hospital;
foi convocado para voltar dentro de uma semana:
dali a uma semana ele já não se sentia capaz de ir, e foi
um vizinho, o Amadeu, que mandou vir uma ambulância. 

na recepção, quando chegou, uma ajudante meteu-lhe

umas chanatas nos pés, grandes demais;

deu dois passos com elas, escorregou, caiu 

e fez um enorme lanho na testa; e agora?

agora,

antes da consulta da tosse

tinha de ir às urgências,

analisar o golpe e levar uma série de pontos.

no dia seguinte, o Amadeu e a mulher foram visitá-lo,

- ele que tinha? quiseram saber:

- tosse!

-só sabemos da queda cá dentro ... e

então foi transferido para outro hospital;

e deram-lhe o respectivo nome, mas

ali não estava.

correram hospitais, mas ele não estava,

não se sabia nada:

- ou houve troca de papéis...porque tosse não era,

o hospital era outro...muitos podiam ser!

e com esta quantidade de serviço!

o Amadeu e a mulher procuraram 

em todo o lugar imaginável, até que

finalmente conseguiram a certidão de óbito.»

Alberto Pimenta. Ilhíada. Edições do Saguão., p. 71

Under The Magnolia Tree

 

 

H.O.W.L.

Women need a place they can swim naked.

by ANNIE GARDNER

The yellowed pages have been pressed paper thin, shadowing near the binding. They make a faint sound like dry grass when turned. There is a black and white photograph of a man bending over, chopping wood; two young boys saw back and forth through a tree. Instructing: this is how you build a cabin; this is how you make a home.

This house, the barn, and the fifty acres surrounding it are collectively owned in a trust for women. One woman painted a yellow sun, either rising or setting, on the side of the house. Years later, another woman built a wooden gate around the trashcans in the barn.  She painted it yellow, to match the sun.   

Upstairs, in a room with a slanted orange ceiling and worn floral couch, there is a full bookshelf, overflow lining the top of a large wardrobe. 




There are two small bedrooms empty except for some paint cans. Downstairs there are two square bedrooms, one for a resident, one a guest room. In the living room, there are white binders with hand drawn maps, plant guides, blueprints. Decorated notebooks filled with letters and musings of guests and residents.

"DECEMBER 1997 - IT’S GETTING VERY CLOSE TO WINTER SOLSTICE…" reads the first page of one of the books in buoyant red letters. "A GOOD TIME TO BEGIN A ‘GUEST BOOK.’ I HOPE ANY  ♀ WHO VISITS THIS LAND WILL WRITE IN THIS BOOK… DRAW IN IT… PUT A PHOTO IN IT. ME… MY NAME IS GLO..." 

I meet Glo at a cafe in Richmond, Vermont, before I make my first trip to HOWL. Glo walks in the same upbeat, not quite spacey, but halting and pensive way she writes. She wears a jacket and a fleece, billowy blue pants with dragonflies on them, Crocs and wool socks. She and another woman sit down across from me.

“This is Susan,” says Glo. Susan stirs a cup of coffee. Glo leans forward, tapping her fingers along the table’s edge.  Glo is missing a part of three of her fingers on her right hand. Neither woman wears any rings. Both talk of their children, long grown. Glo mentions a former husband, long gone.  Glo has short white hair and thick brown eyebrows. She is seventy-four, with fine hairs all over her face.

“Have you ever lived at the end of a dirt road?” she asks. She has. A founding mother of Huntington Open Women’s Land, HOWL, and a member of the Collective, she spent eighteen years living at the end of a dirt road.  Now she lives with her lover -- she says the word with a flourish and a smile -- her lover, Susan, in Burlington, the city. It’s manageable, because they live by Lake Champlain and Glo gets a glimpse of the vastness she needs there.

“The sense of looking down at the world, across it.” That was Glo’s favorite part of living at HOWL.  You can hike the property to Grandmother Tree, and look out over mountains and valleys.  But it’s not for everyone. It’s isolated, but also “not a place for people who want to live alone.” Holly, the current resident, has been living there by herself, but she’s on her way out. The Collective is in the process of interviewing new candidates for residency.

“So you have questions,” Glo says. “Fire away.”

“What do you look for when you interview someone?” I ask.

“Someone friendly, who can handle the winters, who is open to community.”

I nod.

“You seem pretty friendly,” Glo says.

I have broad shoulders and a firm handshake. Calloused hands and direct eye contact. And I realize Glo thinks I am trying to move in. That this is my interview.  I have my Swiss Army knife in the pocket of my pink vest, zipped up over my men’s plaid flannel shirt. I am not wearing a bra. I push my glasses up my nose with my finger and I don’t correct her. Glo leans and peers over the rim of Susan’s coffee cup to see if she has finished, if it is time for them to show me the way to HOWL.

The winter was a long, cold one, and now it is mud season, which comes before spring. The drive up the hill to the house is slow to avoid branches and deep ruts where the road has been weathered. There was a wild windstorm that cracked branches off the tree right next to the house. The house was built in the 1800s, “not by rich folk.” It’s white with a new tin roof and a lopsided garage. There is an old wood stove and a new gas one, and running water, though it is not potable at the moment. There is an outhouse but also a working bathroom, though you have to put the toilet paper in a trashcan. Adjacent is the barn, which settled down crooked a few years back when the women hired a man to dig a ditch along it for drainage and he dug too close to the foundation.

“I’d live here again,” Glo says in almost every place she shows me. In the years she lived at HOWL, she slept in almost every room for some period of time.  Holly seems startled when we open the red front door, dazed and in white long underwear. She goes into her bedroom and puts shorts on over her thermals. Glo is polite, but mutters under her breath that she’ll fill me in when we get outside.

“Holly has been complaining about critters since she moved in,” Glo says, “Termites? Ants? -- I lived there for eighteen years and only ever had one rat.”  Which she caught and drove down to the Audubon Society.

I guess the mouse nest she cleaned out a few days ago and the garter snakes she used to find in her heated waterbed, and the ferret who came inside and ate the dog’s food and the swallows that fly through the upstairs of the barn don’t count as “critters.”

Glo has a lot of favorite things about HOWL: “Watching the moon rise over that place, being close to nature, picnics, cookouts.” She shows me the small pond. The path is blocked in a few places by tree limbs, cracked and trailing the ground. I duck under one big branch and then turn around to find Susan and Glo, short white hair zigzagging in the wind, leaning their weight against the wood, pulling it to the side. They give up, out of breath and skirt around the bough. There is a work day coming up, anyways. One of the privileges of being part of the Collective is the chance to clean, plant, paint, build. “Women need a place they can swim naked.”

“I built that,” Glo says, pointing to a half-caved-in sauna. Glo remembers something everywhere, and everywhere sees something to be done. A rusted fire pit, a tree hung with empty bird feeders, a stone Buddha. Upturned rabbit cages from the farmers, who say they are going to come back and clear them out, an outhouse with a rainbow flag fluttering over the door.  

All these remnants from members of the Collective and the women who have lived and visited are scattered across the land. Then there is a small burial ground, the Memorial Garden, with six stone piles, marking women’s ashes. A crow perches on the one furthest from us.  From a distance it looks real, but it is rusted metal. It does not fly away.

“That is my mother’s crow,” says Glo. We stand next to a bench that has blown over.

In the last days that her mother was breathing, losing lucidity and life, there were crows on the roof next door.  They watched them out the window. We look at the crocuses that are pushing up around the stones, look at the green protecting dark purple. The flowers haven’t opened yet. The rest of the landscape is brown, a silverish shimmer of new wood where branches have split off trees.

---

*  *  *

I ask Crow how many women she thinks have fallen in love at HOWL. She laughs long and clear. “Many.” She breaks the word into two long syllables. Carol “Crow” Cohen is a petite seventy-two-year-old Jewish woman with a thick purple strip in her grey hair. She started going by Crow in the 80s to distance herself from the patriarchy. An act of naming, an intentional choosing of self. She has a big nose and a tan face that creases easily where she smiles. She wears large red glasses, speckled with color, and runs her right hand up and down the bare skin of her arm as we speak. The leukemia took a lot of energy out of her, but she has started work again on her memoir about HOWL. She is smiling as she shakes her head and exhales. “I would say a lot, a lot of women probably have fallen in love at HOWL." 

“I admit,” she says, “I was one of them.”

In the early 70s, when Crow had just moved to Vermont with her husband and two children, she began to actively seek out communities of women. And a space away from everything, the confines and constructs of her heterosexual life. She and her husband owned a small cabin and she went there by herself. To smoke pot and get naked, write and contemplate life and woman. Woman as one, as an entity of her own.

“When I was a kid, Parents magazine put out a subsidiary journal for girls called Polly Pigtails, and Polly and her friends had a little club house for girls.” Crow sprays a minty gel into her mouth, to ease the effects of radiation. “G-I-R-L-Z only, and that just sparked my imagination”.

*  *  *

In September Holly put everything she could fit in her SUV and drove to Vermont from Huntsville, Alabama. Men in the South are different, she tells me. “If you need help with your car in the South,” she says, looking out the window at my car, which is parked in the gravel driveway. “Like the tire is flat, or it’s smoking or something.” She waits for me to nod. “You just stand outside and look scared and there will be three men in a pick-up truck there in three minutes to save you.” She sees my skeptical look. “Don’t try and pay them. They’ll be offended. They live for that.” I can’t tell if she thinks this is a good thing.  

She took a recon road trip to Vermont, where she found a sign on the grave of Bill Wilson, founder of AA. And the sign was this: a six month token, a six year token, a blank stone space, and then a 26 year token. Holly was 16 years sober and the universe was leaving her a trail of breadcrumbs.

The living room is stacked with boxes, folded blankets, hangers. Holly has packed almost everything except her books and art supplies, which are organized neatly on a wall of shelves in her bedroom. There is a pile of purple pens on the windowsill and a framed quote: "I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat." Edgar Allan Poe on her desk. She collects first editions of John Irving books and she gently takes her favorite, A Widow for a Year, off the shelf, dusting the edges and running her fingers over the cover before she puts it back. The floor is covered in pencil shavings.  

“Usually I’m very neat,” she says. I’m not sure if I believe her. She starts cleaning in the kitchen, running water in the sink over piled dishes, clearing half-eaten hummus and yogurt containers and subway wrappers and open cans of dog food off the counter. She chugs the last ounces of a liter of Mountain Dew before throwing the bright green bottle in one of the trash bags. She is pale and fleshy, wearing a faded navy blue jersey, logo and lettering scraped off. Enormous black basketball shorts bisect her belly.  Her long brown hair is stringy and looks greasy, pulled back tightly with a scrunchie. You can see the pale skin of her scalp from between patches of hair. She didn’t have any winter clothes when she moved into HOWL. “Snow,” she says, “is like a hug from God.” The power went out during the winter, for seven days. One day, she remembers, she stepped outside, into the white, the snow, the complete and utter silence. It was magic. “I felt like an astronaut on the moon.” That, she says, is what she liked about living at HOWL. The rest is complicated. “I was the least religious of my friends,” she says. “All I did was drive 1,700 miles and now I am the most religious person any of my friends.” She had her new pastor and his wife over to HOWL for dinner once. They ate at the wooden table under a painting of a naked blue woman. When they left, Holly’s eyes widened as she realized what they had broken bread beneath.

Holly likes the town of Huntington, the library and the church, the foliage and the AA meetings she’d started. Her new pastor helped her find a room there. His sons are going to come up with a truck to help her move out.  

“There is a reason I didn’t rush a sorority,” she says. She shakes her head and purses her lips.  “I do not do well with female interpersonal drama.” She has a tattoo of a bull on her ankle, and a shooting star.

“I’m not gay.” She puts a lot of emphasis on the word “not” and rolls her eyes as if it is a thing she has to say a lot.

“The thing is,” she says, “HOWL, it’s not a lesbian space, it’s a women’s space.” I nod.

“Sometimes I feel like God double crossed me,” she jokes. She waits to see if I laugh. “I’m not gay, I’m just not. But I have bad luck with men.”

*  *  *

The founding mothers of HOWL may have had bad luck with men, but “luck” implies randomness, not the reoccurring narrative they call patriarchy.  They went to the woods because in the cities and suburbs and towns they felt their lives drawn out in straight lines.

“HOWL developed from the energy of several of the women in the Burlington Women’s Community that were working on a radical feminist newspaper called The Commonwommon,” Crow says. There was a lot of momentum -- separatist energy, loud conversations, a rise in women’s lands throughout the United States. Crow visited some of these all-female communities. “A lot of it was just lesbian land, but the founding group wanted women’s land.” A resource for any woman who wandered by or sought it out. They purchased HOWL in 1986, as “space for women-only that feels safe and energetic,” with open doors except to men, where “we can do what we want on it and not be bothered by male energy.”

For Holly, HOWL was a roof. A place to blog and work on her novel and live with her dog. The sheep farmers that lived there before her, they got involved in the Collective, invested in the community. They studied the soil, reclaimed the pasturelands, fought often and loudly, and eventually bought their own farm in the Northeast Kingdom. There was a Cherokee feminist sun ritual every July for Native American women from all over the country; writers retreats, music festivals. Crow hosted Jewish lesbian gatherings and now runs a twelve-step retreat at HOWL every month.

Crow has written about HOWL before, is in the process of doing so again. She keeps the archive in the corner of a room in her Burlington apartment. A lopsided stack of cardboard boxes filled with manila folders, photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes. They document visitors, meetings, issues of race, gender, age. Open Women’s land: no gatekeepers, no individual owner, no hierarchy. “Now one of the things that HOWL has attracted over the years is women in crisis. Abused women, homeless women, mentally ill women,” women who needed more then HOWL can provide, many of whom were not collective or cooperative. But there are no gatekeepers, no individual owner, no hierarchy. When Crow sat down with the Collective and began rewriting the bylaws and examining the infrastructure of HOWL, there was a lot of resistance. “There were women up there who believed it should be anarchistic and not so many rules and not policies,” says Crow.

Deciding how to spell ♀ took a long time.  And it doesn’t seem like they came to any definitive conclusion. The blog and the Facebook page and the official documents spell the name differently. That’s the thing about a Collective, about coming to a consensus. There is women, woman, and then there is womyn and wommin and wimmin. Many variations; just no man, no men.

*  *  *

Michelle speaks quietly, her grey hair pushed behind her ears. She shakes my hand tentatively and smiles. At fifty-seven she is the youngest member of the Collective. She wears a sun charm around her neck and a glass bead bracelet. Michelle says everyone is nervous about having the house empty. “You need boots on the ground” to keep a place secure.  Especially the house at the end of a dirt road, “right here with nature coming in.”

The house is over 150 years standing, the basement like an old root cellar. Cool, packed dirt floor, the ceiling the underbelly of the floorboards.  Heat leaks out and cold seeps in through the stone foundation. Michelle wants to see the house cut down energy use, thinks that they could spray some sort of foam between the stones to insulate. “The whole house is like an envelope,” she says, mapping with her hands the way it is all connected, from the basement to the small bedroom on the second floor she is helping repaint.   

Michelle likes to come up to HOWL and do projects. She wants to carve out hiking trails and reroof the barn, farm the land and update social media. She wants to get chainsaw certified so she can clear dead trees. She hosted a retreat at the house a few weeks back, had everyone sit in a circle and use a talking stick. “I had to grow up before I could call myself a feminist,” she says, her foot tap tap tapping on the rug.  She has been reading a lot about bisexuality. Married to a man, but at a place where she wants to learn about her herself as a woman, she talks slowly, thinking over her words, experiences, the road ahead.

*  *  *

“We have a pig,” Stephie says. She has a big smile and bright red glasses framed by wavy white hair. “Well, it’s the neighbor's actually, but it gets into the trash.” She goes inside the house and changes from a long flowy skirt into faded jeans, loose on her strong wiry frame, and a blue tank top, a silver necklace lying flat against her chest. Stephie is seventy-two and learned about HOWL six months ago from a group she belongs to, SOAL. Single Older Active Lesbians.

We drag a plastic bin from the barn and start picking up the flattened tin cans, plastic bottles, and wrappers that are scattered behind the house -- from the pig. “I was hoping to get this picked up before you got here,” Stephie says, creeping through an overgrown thicket to get a warped Mountain Dew bottle. She has a deep voice, trailing off here and there, the same way she moves. From conversation, to piece of trash, to silently scanning the ground before remembering, “I had things I wanted to say,” she fishes a piece of plastic from between branches and stands up.

She didn’t save for retirement. She rents out rooms in her house to women, modeling her living situation after Dykes to Watch Out For, a comic strip by an idol, Alison Bechdel.

“I could come to HOWL. I could pay the rent and buy food, and live and that is a relief.” She slices her hands horizontally through the air on the word “relief.” She says that of course what she really wants is what everyone really wants is to find a sweetie and move somewhere and live together and be in love. “I’m trying to get my life together."

There is a hip-high pile of rocks north of the house, set in a dent in the land.

“Just a big pile of rocks,” says Stephie. She hasn’t seen this pile before. She stands at the raised rim of earth around the stones, spreads her arms out, and breathes through her nose. Closes her eyes. The breeze has picked up, the air is warm, surrounds us with noise, a soft rustle of the grass. The sun streaks through the clouds. She turns to me and asks, “You know the thing about these rocks?” She answers herself. “Just a big pile of rocks, that was moved here by women.” She says the word “women” like a prayer. She tilts her head and walks around the pile, rearranging stones, bending down to move rocks that have rolled off back into the pile.

“Men are important,” Stephie says. “For having babies. And they can lift heavy things.” She pauses in her steps to think of other possible uses. “But I’m scared of them,” she says, because if you need them, you can’t leave. If you depend on them you are stuck.

“Have you ever been married?” I ask.

“Once,” she says, looking down at her feet stepping through the yellow grass. “Well, twice actually.” She makes eye contact and shrugs her pale shoulders. “I wanted babies.”  

She has two grown children, a girl she doesn’t worry about, and a boy she does.  She left her husband, got her nursing degree and started working in her forties. The power in this -- the act of leaving -- was the ground beneath her words. “I could say if you lift a hand against me, I’m leaving, and I could mean it.”

*  *  *

I spent a night at HOWL that was grey, but in a warm way. The breeze was a clue from summer, a hint from spring. The pond water was cold enough to make me arch my back, clear enough that my submerged skin seemed magnified. There are things you notice best about a place when you are barefoot in the dark: the uneven floorboards, their slight bending, shifting, creak under your footsteps.  

Bare skin, bare trees, bare sky, 
just the bare bones of what these women need to live
and thrive, and a voluptuous blue woman painted
and posed over the dining room table. 

Fonte: http://www.40towns.org/howl.html

 I am becoming my mother        By Lorna Goodson

Yellow/brown woman
Fingers smelling always of onions

My mother raises rare blooms
and waters them with tea
her birth waters sang like rivers
my mother is now me.

My mother had a linen dress
the colour of the sky
and stored lace and damask
tablecloths
to pull shame out of her eye.

I am becoming my mother
brown/yellow woman
fingers smelling always of onions.

 

The Last Dinner Party - Nothing Matters

I have my sentence now
At last, I know just how you felt
I dig my fingers in, expecting more than just the skin
'Cause we're a lot alike
In favor, like a motorbike
A sailor and a nightingale
Dancing in convertibles

And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters
And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters

We've got the highway tight
The moon is bursting with headlights
One more and we're away
Love tender in your Chevrolet

And we're a lot alike
In favor, like a motorbike
A sailor and a nightingale
Dancing in convertibles

And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters
And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters

Even when the cold comes crashing through
I'm putting all my bets on you
I hope they never understand us

I put my heart inside your palms
My home in your arms
Now we know nothing matters
Nothing matters

And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters
And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters
And you can hold me, like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters
And you can hold me like he held her
And I will fuck you like nothing matters, ooh

A Woman Is Talking to Death, Judy Grahn

 One

Testimony in trials that never got heard

my lovers teeth are white geese flying above me
my lovers muscles are rope ladders under my hands

we were driving home slow
my lover and I, across the long Bay Bridge,
one February midnight, when midway
over in the far left lane, I saw a strange scene:

one small young man standing by the rail,
and in the lane itself, parked straight across
as if it could stop anything, a large young
man upon a stalled motorcycle, perfectly
relaxed as if he’d stopped at a hamburger stand;
he was wearing a peacoat and levis, and
he had his head back, roaring, you
could almost hear the laugh, it
was so real.

“Look at that fool,” I said, “in the
middle of the bridge like that,” a very
womanly remark.

Then we heard the meaning of the noise
of metal on a concrete bridge at 50
miles an hour, and the far left lane
filled up with a big car that had a
motorcycle jammed on its front bumper, like
the whole thing would explode, the friction
sparks shot up bright orange for many feet
into the air, and the racket still sets
my teeth on edge.

When the car stopped we stopped parallel
and Wendy headed for the callbox while I
ducked across those 6 lanes like a mouse
in the bowling alley. “Are you hurt?” I said,
the middle-aged driver had the greyest black face,
“I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, what happened?”

Then I remembered. “Somebody,” I said, “was on
the motorcycle.” I ran back,
one block? two blocks? the space for walking
on the bridge is maybe 18 inches, whoever
engineered this arrogance. in the dark
stiff wind it seemed I would
be pushed over the rail, would fall down
screaming onto the hard surface of
the bay, but I did not. I found the tall young man
who thought he owned the bridge, now lying on
his stomach, head cradled in his broken arm.

He had glasses on, but somewhere he had lost
most of his levis, where were they?
and his shoes. Two short cuts on his buttocks,
and that was the only mark except his thin white
seminal tubes were all strung out behind; no
child left in him; and he looked asleep.

I plucked wildly at his wrist, then put it
down; there were two long haired women
holding back the traffic just behind me
with their bare hands, the machines came
down like mad bulls, I was scared, much
more than usual, I felt easily squished
like the earthworms crawling on a busy
sidewalk after the rain; I wanted to
leave.  And met the driver, walking back.

“The guy is dead.” I gripped his hand,
the wind was going to blow us off the bridge.

“Oh my God,” he said, “haven’t I had enough
trouble in my life?” He raised his head,
and for a second was enraged and yelling,
at the top of the bridge—“I was just driving
home!” His head fell down. “My God, and
now I’ve killed somebody.”

I looked down at my own peacoat and levis,
then over at the dead man’s friend, who
was bawling and blubbering, what they would
call hysteria in a woman. “It isn’t possible”
he wailed, but it was possible, it was
indeed, accomplished and unfeeling, snoring
in its peacoat, and without its levis on.

He died laughing: that’s a fact.

I had a woman waiting for me,
in her car and in the middle of the bridge,
I’m frightened, I said.
I’m afraid, he said, stay with me,
please don’t go, stay with me, be
my witness—“No,” I said, “I’ll be your
witness—later,” and I took his name
and number, “but I can’t stay with you,
I’m too frightened of the bridge, besides
I have a woman waiting
and no license—
and no tail lights—“
So I left—
as I have left so many of my lovers.

we drove home
shaking, Wendy’s face greyer
than any white person’s I have ever seen.
maybe he beat his wife, maybe he once
drove taxi, and raped a lover
of mine—how to know these things?
we do each other in, that’s a fact.

who will be my witness?
death wastes our time with drunkenness
and depression
death, who keeps us from our
lovers.
he had a woman waiting for him,
I found out when I called the number
days later

“Where is he” she said, “he’s disappeared.”
“He’ll be all right” I said, “we could
have hit the guy as easy as anybody, it
wasn’t anybody’s fault, they’ll know that,”
women so often say dumb things like that,
they teach us to be sweet and reassuring,
and say ignorant things, because we dont invent
the crime, the punishment, the bridges

that same week I looked into the mirror
and nobody was there to testify;
how clear, an unemployed queer woman
makes no witness at all,
nobody at all was there for
those two questions: what does
she do, and who is she married to?

I am the woman who stopped on the bridge
and this is the man who was there
our lovers teeth are white geese flying
above us, but we ourselves are
easily squished.

keep the women small and weak
and off the street, and off the
bridges, that’s the way, brother
one day I will leave you there,
as I have left you there before,
working for death.

we found out later
what we left him to.
Six big policemen answered the call,
all white, and no child in them.
they put the driver up against his car
and beat the hell out of him.
What did you kill that poor kid for?
you mutherfucking nigger.
that’s a fact.

Death only uses violence
when there is ant kind of resistance,
the rest of the time a slow
weardown will do.

They took him to 4 different hospitals
til they got a drunk test report to fit their
case, and held him five days in jail
without a phone call.
how many lovers have we left.

there are as many contradictions to the game,
as there are players.
a woman is talking to death,
though talk is cheap, and life takes a long time
to make
right. He got a cheesy lawyer
who had him cop a plea, 15 to 20
instead of life
Did I say life?

the arrogant young man who thought he
owned the bridge, and fell asleep on it
died laughing: that’s a fact.
the driver sits out his time
off the street somewhere,
does he have the most vacant of
eyes, will he die laughing?

 

Two
They don’t have to lynch the women anymore

death sits on my doorstep
cleaning his revolver

death cripples my feet and sends me out
to wait for the bus alone,
then comes by driving a taxi.

the woman on our block with 6 young children
has the most vacant of eyes
death sits in her bedroom, loading
his revolver

they don’t have to lynch the women
very often anymore, although
they used to—the lord and his men
went through the villages at night, beating &
killing every woman caught
outdoors.
the European witch trials took away
an independent people; two different villages
—after the trials were through that year—
had left in them, each—
one living woman:
one

What were those other women up to? had they
run over someone? stopped on the wrong bridge?
did they have teeth like
any kind of geese, or children
in them?

 

Three
This woman is a lesbian be careful

In the military hospital where I worked
as a nurse’s aide, the walls of the halls
were lined with howling women
waiting to deliver
or to have some parts removed.
One of the big private rooms contained
the general’s wife, who needed
a wart taken off her nose.
we were instructed to give her special attention
not because of her wart or her nose
but because of her husband, the general.

as many women as men die, and that’s a fact.

At work there was one friendly patient, already
claimed, a young woman burnt apart with X-ray,
she had long white tubes instead of openings;
rectum, bladder, vagina—I combed her hair, it
was my job, but she took care of me as if
nobody’s touch could spoil her.
ho ho death, ho death
have you seen the twinkle in the dead woman’s eye?

when you are a nurse’s aide
someone suddenly notices you
and yells about the patient’s bed,
and tears the sheets apart so you
can do it over, and over
while the patient waits
doubled over in her pain
for you to make the bed again
and no one ever looks at you,
only at what you do not do

Here, general, hold this soldier’s bed pan
for a moment, hold it for a year—
then we’ll promote you to making his bed.
we believe you wouldn’t make such messes

if you had to clean up after them.

that’s a fantasy.
this woman is a lesbian, be careful.

When I was arrested and being thrown out
of the military, the order went out: dont anybody
speak to this woman, and for those three
long months, almost nobody did: the dayroom, when
I entered it, fell silent til I had gone; they
were afraid, they knew the wind would blow
them over the rail, the cops would come,
the water would run into their lungs.
Everything I touched
was spoiled. They were my lovers, those
women, but nobody had taught us how to swim.
I drowned, I took 3 or 4 others down
when I signed the confession of what we
had done                together.

No one will ever speak to me again.

I read this somewhere; I wasn’t there:
in WWII the US army had invented some floating
amphibian tanks, and took them over to
the coast of Europe to unload them,
the landing ships all drawn up in a fleet,
and everybody watching. Each tank had a
crew of 6 and there were 25 tanks.
The first went down the landing planks
and sank, the second, the third, the
fourth, the fifth, the sixth went down
and sank. They weren’t supposed
to sink, the engineers had
made a mistake. The crews looked around
wildly for the order to quit,
but none came, and in the sight of
thousands of men, each 6 crewmen
saluted his officers, battened down
his hatch in turn and drove into the
sea, and drowned, until all 25 tanks
were gone. did they have vacant
eyes, die laughing, or what? what
did they talk about, those men,
as the water came in?

was the general their lover?

 

Four
A Mock Interrogation

Have you ever held hands with a woman?

Yes, many times—women about to deliver, women about to have breasts removed, wombs removed, miscarriages, women having epileptic fits, having asthma, cancer, women having breast bone marrow sucked out of them by nervous or indifferent interns, women with heart condition, who were vomiting, overdosed, depressed, drunk, lonely to the point of extinction: women who had been run over, beaten up. deserted. starved. women who had been bitten by rats; and women who were happy, who were celebrating, who were dancing with me in large circles or alone, women who were climbing mountains or up and down walls, or trucks and roofs and needed a boost up, or I did; women who simply wanted to hold my hand because they liked me, some women who wanted to hold my hand because they liked me better than anyone.

These were many women?

Yes. many.

What about kissing? Have you kissed any women?

I have kissed many women.

When was the first woman you kissed with serious feeling?

The first woman ever I kissed was Josie, who I had loved at such a distance for months. Josie was not only beautiful, she was tough and handsome too. Josie had black hair and white teeth and strong brown muscles. Then she dropped out of school unexplained. When she came back she came back for one day only, to finish the term, and there was a child in her. She was all shame, pain, and defiance. Her eyes were dark as the water under a bridge and no one would talk to her, they laughed and threw things at her. In the afternoon I walked across the front of the class and looked deep into Josie’s eyes and I picked up her chin with my hand, because I loved her, because nothing like her trouble would ever happen to me, because I hated it that she was pregnant and unhappy, and an outcast. We were thirteen.

You didn’t kiss her?

How does it feel to be thirteen and having a baby?

You didn’t actually kiss her?

Not in fact.

You have kissed other women?

Yes, many, some of the finest women I know, I have kissed. women who were lonely, women I didn’t know and didn’t want to, but kissed because that was a way to say yes we are still alive and loveable, though separate, women who recognized a loneliness in me, women who were hurt, I confess to kissing the top of a 55 year old woman’s head in the snow in boston, who was hurt more deeply than I have ever been hurt, and I wanted her as a very few people have wanted me—I wanted her and me to own and control and run the city we lived in, to staff the hospital I knew would mistreat her, to drive the transportation system that had betrayed her, to patrol the streets controlling the men who would murder or disfigure or disrupt us, not accidently with machines, but on purpose, because we are not allowed on the street alone—

Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?

Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal women to die before my eyes or in my ears or under my hands because I thought I could do nothing, I am guilty of leaving a prostitute who held a knife to my friend’s throat because we would not sleep with her, we thought she was old and fat and ugly; I am guilty of not loving her who needed me; I regret all the women I have not slept with or comforted, who pulled themselves away from me for lack of something I had not the courage to fight for, for us, our life, our planet, our city, our meat and potatoes, our love. These are indecent acts, lacking courage, lacking a certain fire behind the eyes, which is the symbol, the raised fist, the sharing of resources, the resistance that tells death he will starve for lack of the fat of us, our extra. Yes I have committed acts of indecency with women and most of them were acts of omission. I regret them bitterly.

 

Five
Bless this day oh cat our house

“I was allowed to go
3 places, growing up,” she said—
“3 places, no more.
there was a straight line from my house
to school, a straight line from my house
to church, a straight line from my house
to the corner store.”
her parents thought something might happen to her.
but nothing ever did.

my lovers teeth are white geese flying above me
my lovers muscles are rope ladders under my hands
we are the river of life and the fat of the land
death, do you tell me I cannot touch this woman?
if we use each other up
on each other
that’s a little bit less for you
a little bit less for you, ho
death, ho ho death.

Bless this day oh cat our house
help me be not such a mouse
death tells the woman to stay home
and then breaks in the window.

I read this somewhere, I wasnt there:
In feudal Europe, if a woman committed adultery
her husband would sometimes tie her
down, catch a mouse and trap it
under a cup on her bare belly, until
it gnawed itself out, now are you
afraid of mice?

 

Six
Dressed as I am, a young man once called
me names in Spanish

a woman who talks to death
is a dirty traitor

inside a hamburger joint and
dressed  as I am, a young man once called me
names in Spanish
then he called me queer and slugged me.
first I thought the ceiling had fallen down
but there was the counterman making a ham
sandwich, and there was I spread out on his
counter.

For God’s sake I said when
I could talk, this guy is beating me up
can’t you call the police or something,
can’t you stop him? he looked up from
working on his sandwich, which was my
sandwich, I had ordered it. He liked
the way I looked. “There’s a pay phone
right across the street” he said.

I couldn’t listen to the Spanish language
for weeks afterward, without feeling the
most murderous of urges, the simple
association of one thing to another,
so damned simple.

The next day I went to the police station
to become an outraged citizen
Six big policemen stood in the hall,
all white and dressed as they do
they were well pleased with my story, pleased
at what had gotten beat out of me, so
I left them laughing, went home fast
and locked my door.
For several nights I fantasized the scene
again, this time grabbing a chair
and smashing it over the bastard’s head,
killing him. I called him a spic, and
killed him. my face healed. his didnt.
no child in me.

now when I remember I think:
maybe he was Josie’s baby.
all the chickens come home to roost,
all of them.

 

Seven
Death and disfiguration

One Christmas eve my lovers and I
we left the bar, driving home slow
there was a woman lying in the snow
by the side of the road. She was wearing
a bathrobe and no shoes, where were
her shoes? she had turned the snow
pink, under her feet. she was an Asian
woman, didn’t speak much English, but
she said a taxi driver beat her up
and raped her, throwing her out of his
care.
what on earth was she doing there
on a street she helped to pay for
but doesn’t own?
doesn’t she know to stay home?

I am a pervert, therefore I’ve learned
to keep my hands to myself in public
but I was so drunk that night,
I actually did something loving
I took her in my arms, this woman,
until she could breathe right, and
my friends are perverts too
they touched her too
we all touched her.
“You’re going to be all right”
we lied. She started to cry
“I’m 55 years old” she said
and that said everything.

Six big policemen answered the call
no child in them.
they seemed afraid to touch her,
then grabbed her like a corpse and heaved her
on their metal stretcher into the van,
crashing and clumsy.
She was more frightened than before.
they were cold and bored.
‘don’t leave me’ she said.
‘she’ll be all right’ they said.
we left, as we have left all of our lovers
as all lovers leave all lovers
much too soon to get the real loving done.

 

Eight
a mock interrogation

Why did you get into the cab with him, dressed as you are?

I wanted to go somewhere.

Did you know what the cab driver might do
if you got into the cab with him?

I just wanted to go somewhere.

How many times did you
get into the cab with him?

I dont remember.

If you dont remember, how do you know it happened to you?

 

Nine
Hey you death

ho and ho poor death
our lovers teeth are white geese flying above us
our lovers muscles are rope ladders under our hands
even though no women yet go down to the sea in ships
except in their dreams.

only the arrogant invent a quick and meaningful end
for themselves, of their own choosing.
everyone else knows how very slow it happens
how the woman’s existence bleeds out her years,
how the child shoots up at ten and is arrested and old
how the man carries a murderous shell within him
and passes it on.

we are the fat of the land, and
we all have our list of casualties

to my lovers I bequeath
the rest of my life

I want nothing left of me for you, ho death
except some fertilizer
for the next batch of us
who do not hold hands with you
who do not embrace you
who try not to work for you
or sacrifice themselves or trust
or believe you, ho ignorant
death, how do you know
we happened to you?

wherever our meat hangs on our own bones
for our own use
your pot is so empty
death, ho death
you shall be poor

"A Woman Is Talking to Death" from Judy Grahn's The Judy Grahn Reader (Aunt Lute Press, 2009). wwwauntlute.com