by Stella Reed

An English translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Emily Wilson finds that the original text described sirens as bird women, not mermaids

Women who peck at ligatures
Women with plumes of basil and milk
Women who are the arrow to your dove
the canaries of coal mines
Women with voices not tender
Women who sing of strange fruit
An augury of birds who hide
the future in snowstorms
the past in ringing trees
Whose eyes hold sand from poisoned seas
the grainy reels of pornography
Women who refused constellations
Who flew from windows
to breathe the rain in greening pines
Who keep sword beneath wing
Whose breath smells of smoked peat
and the meat on remote highways
Women born of grief
their sky a white wing
Who nest in fields of blossom and bone
If you wear their feathers in your hair
you’ll hear the story of your death
Women who teethe on roses
and bleed on lilies
Women who dream their mothers
wear the crown of a bull
Who cultivate language
of ashes pitch cone
Who yell Goddamit from telephone poles
Women of gunshot and dusk
Who read the calligraphy
of felled trees
of oceans bulging at neap tide
Women whose dark beauty lives in seams
Women who are plundered and razed
How fury their chorus
when they move their bodies
through a sky clear of gods
How you cannot touch them
How you shall not touch them
How they become sirens
How they become song


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Stella Reed (she / her) is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water, 2019, from 3: A Taos Press. She is the winner of the Jacar Press Chapbook Prize for Myth from the field where the fox runs with its tail on fire and the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. Stella is a poetry teacher for several communities including homeless and domestic violence shelters, and Title 1 public school students.