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


____________________________________________________________

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.

by Stella Reed

Dear Yashodhara,

I, too, make do without fathers. Take full fat
in my chai. Never stop to ponder the meaning
of duality, having lived with a person inside me.
Before he was a god he lay naked in a charnel ground
contemplating existence. He sat beneath a spreading tree
where Mara’s daughters danced for him, breasts
with the sheen of new apples, while you were home
changing diapers, wiping milky spit from the furniture,
pulling your striped flesh from a damp bra,
your fluid body a meal.

We both know enlightenment
is when the child screams all night and we don’t leave her
for the crows to pick over. We saunter and jostle
up and down halls, strap her in a car seat and drive
blocks around blocks, guilt about our carbon footprint
rubbing against the last collapsing nerve.
Beneath the lantern of the mind is the mud
of these bodies, able to conceive what the mind cannot.
I lift my daughter to the saddle of a carousel horse,
watch her ride the spinning prayer wheel,
pray it carries her away
from the curse of too much light.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stella Reed is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019). She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. Stella teaches poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. You can find her work in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, and anthologized in They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018).