This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Sally Rosen Kindred, is from Rare Wondrous Things by Alyse Bensel, released by Green Writers Press in 2020.
Housewife
I bend and rise with the grace of a wide-hipped tulip. I distill lavender, smash cloves, repeat a kitchen experiment to boil dye that can bear the cruelty of soap and hard water. I’m spent on the oven coals, radiant heat. I find myself in throes of pin and needle, buckled patterns. I know soft fabric for its translucence. I cannot peer through my own skin into its veined architecture, how my body breathes. But a magnifying glass will let me learn everything concealed within my own flesh, trembling to erupt.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian(Green Writers Press 2020) and three chapbooks. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
Sally Rosen Kindred‘s third poetry book is Where the Wolf(Diode Editions, 2021). She is also the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, as well as three chapbooks, including Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches online workshops for The Poetry Barn.
