And I don’t mind it, because that is who I am, and I feel for them. I advise them not to get behind, to break their insurmountable tasks and papers into smaller tasks, to visit the campus counselors, to get regular sleep and healthy food, to think about medication if need be. I’ve been talking with friends lately about how I perform my gender as an instructor at my university, about how students come to my office hours and look for help–and it’s not just with their papers. We are the place where others gather and dwell, the emotional house for your needs.
I can’t stop thinking about hammered jewelry, and how it is flattened and shaped into being.) She wanted “the safety of a cock.” She knew “nothing of this body / other than the violence it ignited.” And, she asks, “Who would ever choose to be / the damaged house?” Women are, literally, the things that are inhabited–in heterosexual relationships, by men in childbirth, by babies. The speaker says, “I have always been a god-hammered girl.” (Think about that image. This poem is, in many ways, about taking the circumstances that you have been given–the things that seemingly make you weak–and embracing them, becoming ferocious. I read it again and again, pausing on specific lines (like the last couplet). I thought I might pass out or scream or do something, and I realized I was having a panic attack, so I went into an adjoining room and opened up blud and read this poem, this witchy goddess poem (for “bruja” means “witch” in Spanish). But it wasn’t until a little over a week ago, when I was sitting at a keynote address for a conference, deep in my thoughts about how hard it was to concentrate, and what a ridiculous human being I was, and how embarrassing it is to feel deeply for another person, and how scared I was of my dissertation defense, and how scared I am of my student loans, that I really appreciated blud. Rachel McKibbens, from blud (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)Ī few months ago, I first started seeing Rachel McKibbens’ poems circulating among poetry twitter*, and I made a note to get blud, because each new line stunned me. Riddled my tongue with a father’s profanity. When I was young, I kissed the girls too hard, Mother thinned down to a milkless shadow. The last, of course-this cauldron of a cunt. The wet unfolding of my arms, legs & fists. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.Blood-licked. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater. You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).