A poem by Vanessa Shanti Vernando

My Feminism

My feminism is not afraid of sex or secrets or
living fully it is not a religion but a
heightened way of seeing
my feminism does not dislike men but dislikes power
wielded as a force, authority
my feminism is more complex than a girl-power
bumper sticker it means it’s okay to masturbate
initiate sex wear combat boots & dresses take
up knitting or organize radically
my feminism is not detached gender-theorizing
but kindness & recognition that both girls & boys
are socialized into suppressing important parts of
themselves for survival
& that’s not okay
my feminism loves it when girls & boys are friends
my feminism wants respect & love, equality and space
for complexity
there is room in my feminism for all genders or lack
of genders & all flavours of sexual preference & there
is room for the individuals who escape definition
because i think that is beautiful
my feminism is about living as humans even though
the glossy corporate world does not give us that
basic human right & therefore my feminism is
not a commodity but a rallying cry for change
towards what really matters & a desire for
humans to recognize that we all have pains
& fears & joys in common despite our different
genitalia or our pallette of possible skin shades.
my feminism is not afraid & has no copyright.
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A Cure of Souls, by Denise Levertov

The pastor
of grief and dreams

guides his flock towards
the next field

with all his care
He has heard

the bell tolling
but the sheep

are hungry and need
the grass, today and

everyday.  Beautiful
his patience, his long

shadow, the rippling
sound of the flock moving

along the valley.

One of my favorite things about Florida is how much is happening beneath the surface

(Like gallons of water pumping from aquifers into springs, for instance)

"Who can be stillness, little by little
make what is troubled grow clear?
Who can be movement, little by little
make what is still grow quick?"
~Tao Te Ching

One True Poem

Doug Ramspeck

 

 

The deer this time of year are gray. I see them
near the railroad tracks. What I like about them
is how they flee at the first sign they are observed.
But the one today is full-sized, on its side in the bar
ditch, with a white belly, its neck bent, smudges
of red in the snow like dropped handkerchiefs.
I have been thinking about how often my students
arrive at my office to show me poems they have written.
How often they tell the background story, how they
dressed up experience in the skin of a dead deer,
how they splayed themselves in a bar ditch for everyone
to see. Occasionally they weep, wiping their noses
with their fingers, their insides spilling raw at
the roadside, their necks lolling. Sometimes a single
salty drop falls to the handwritten page and stains it,
leaving a blue ink splotch, as though all sorrow
is a smudge. They want to be that poor deer
where the snow is coming down, dropping out
of the sky, making of the body a mound to be buried
in white, the smooth belly the same white as the snow,
as though a deer might enter the landscape, become
the landscape. To be that one true poem, the one
where you bleed a little on the snow. But tomorrow
I will remind my students that there is a weak sun
in this January sky, an old woman with b.o. they stood
behind once while taking the Sacrament, these Ohio
factories with their broken windows and the grass
in summer spilling through the cracks in the cement.
Please, I will say, there is more to write about than dying
grandmothers, a boyfriend who left you, a winning shot
in the state finals, a first sexual experience, an alcoholic
father who made your mother jump once from
a rowboat into Grand Lake St. Mary’s because she’d
forgotten the buns for the hotdogs. Just once let
your poems run wild into the night, like deer rushing
across the road, to feel the aloneness of the body, the way
the legs move and carry us. One last true poem, the one
where the deer is forever by the roadside, the cars
speeding past, how cold and hard the ground feels,
the snow covering us until the rains arrive come spring
and the body transforms gradually to mud. Together,
I will tell them, we will lift that deer from the bar ditch
and tumble it over the edge into the river, like in that
Stafford poem I assigned last week, though my
students all asked the same thing, over and over,
the same thing they always ask: is the story true?