Song for a Thin Sister

Audre Lorde

Either heard or taught as girls we thought that skinny was funny or a little bit silly and feeling a pull toward the large and the colorful I would joke you when you grew too thin. But your new kind of hunger makes me chilly like danger for I see you forever retreating shrinking into a stranger in flight— and growing up black and fat I was so sure that skinny was funny or silly but always white.

fromThe Collected Poems of Audre Lorde Copyright © The Audre Lorde Estate, 1997

Boxes of Andromeda

Athena Dixon

There are no such things as domestic goddesses anymore. Sundays aren’t filled with radio static and good

R&B. No lemon Pledge/ dust rag/ t-shirt remnants. There are no more altars.

In my house there never were. My mother, hearty Midwesterner, swathed in sleeveless work shirts and steel-toed boots was not delicate. She was not always clean.

She chained to a rock of dust and soot and manual labor: chained to early morning piece work; and desperate need for overtime. My mother was a goddess of rough heels and unpainted toes.

Nothing sweet about the sweat clinging to her armpits and forearms and breasts and back and forehead creased and pinched and all things pained at the end of the day.

Each night her head lolled against the back of the sofa, snapping back when she left herself falling. Snapped back because the rock of dust and soot and manual labor never quite left her skin. Was not quite hidden by the plum lipstick puckering her mouth or the fleeting hints of perfume that lingered longer in the bathroom then it did on her flesh. But she was woman. She was god. Mule and spike and post and pine.

A cobble of things lifted and stored, but not delicate. A woman commanding space in circles manual labor afforded.

That piece work allowed. That over time the overtime let her daughter know the joys of hands free of callous and a whole body.

To know the sleep of falling, To know the snap of falling, To know the altar and the pearl.