~*~WOMB~*~

I am proud to be a small part of the inaugural issue of ~*~WOMB~*~, a new online journal for poetries by women (but for everybody), just launched today.

Click below to check out the issue, edited by Michelle Detorie, which includes poetry (a wide range from visual to experimental), as well as an extensive list of links and resources:

~*~WOMB~*~

Speaking of wombs . . . mine is contracting many, many times today, and for the past few days. I do this. I contract earlier and earlier with each pregnancy (I still have 12 weeks to go!), and if I go into the hospital, the contractions inevitably stop and I am sent home with condescending looks. I guess I'll drink lots of water, put my feet up, watch the Golden Globes, and pretend I don't have a bag full of papers to check . . .

Speaking of wombs . . .

Nick And The Candlestick

by Sylvia Plath

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish-
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs-

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.