Feeling Like a Sister: 4 Poems Curated by Anna Clarke

WHEN WE READ HER POEM ‘SHEDDING’ not long ago, The Sister Project invited documentarian Anna Clarke (above), a sister-friend to our own Anastasia Smith, to curate a small show of poems, including hers. Let Anna Clarke take it from here:

Since I am an only child, my real sense of feminine connection stems from my bond with both my mother and grandmother and thusly, an understanding and fascination of my female lineage.  These selected poems speak to that alternate understanding of sisterhood, the ongoing quest to make connection with women outside of one’s given siblinghood. These poems, a tribute to mothers, grandmothers, and the historical and spiritual notion of womanhood, seek to identify and celebrate several ways in which one can feel like a sister.

Shedding
By Anna Clarke

The night my mother shaved her head
I was elsewhere, probably laughing or fucking,
trying to forget the biweekly veins hooked to her forearm.

Always her luxurious hair fell about her fragile face,
small, diamond-shaped eyes peering out from this cave.
It was her sex, the way it swayed as she turned, catching light,

it was her childhood: her grandmother
would brush it hundreds of times before bed,
and braid it like an Alpine girl,
twisting and clipping it to the top of her head.

When she sat down on a stool in the bathroom,
on her sixtieth year, husband behind her,
she smiled, wanting it all to come down,

hitting her shoulders, her back, the floor.
It was time to see the all the infantile
curves of her cranium, the stripped accoutrements,
the true color of her eyes without the frame.

When it was over, her husband took a picture.
She upturned the corners of her mouth,
the white towel still draped over her shoulders
dusted with her dark, prized shedding.

It was the first time she got back to the earth,
healed by plants turned liquid poison,
causing her face for the first time seen,

and her body was warm, smooth, like a woman
just emerged from the womb, more whole and certain.

Sharon Olds, Marjorie Agosin, and Lisel Mueller (L-R)

Grandmother Love Poem
By Sharon Olds

Late in her life, when we fell in love,
I’d take her our from the nursing home
For a chaser and two bourbons. She’d crack
A joke sharp as a tin lid
Hot from the teeth of the can-opener,
And cackle her crack-corn laugh. Next to her
Wit, she prided herself on her hair,
Snowy and abundant. She would lift it up
At the nape of her neck, there in the bar,
And under the white, under the salt-and-
Pepper, she’d show me her true color,
The color it was when she was a bride:
Like her sex in the smoky light she would show me
The pure black.

1939
By Marjorie Agosín
Translated by Cola Franzen and Monica Bruno Galmozzi

I

She knew how to seduce her destiny,
predict the time of flight
In 1939, dressed in garments
of night and happiness
at the threshold of a fearful
Hamburg Harbor
resolved to live,
she sailed
to Southern seas.

In 1938, the windows
of her house of water and stone
resisted the extreme
horror of that night
of broken crystals.

She, my grandmother,
taught me to recognize
the landscape of danger,
the shards of fear,
the impenetrable faces
of women,
fleeing,
accused,
audacious in their will to live.

II

Helena Broder,
created a domain
of papers, fragile vessels,
clandestine poems and
notes to be made,
discreet addresses.
With little baggage,
like a frail and ancient
angel,
she arrived,
although ready to embark again.

I survived next to her
and I was thankful for the gift of her presence.

Curriculum Vitae
By Lisel Mueller

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of
course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.

10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.

11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.

12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.

13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.

14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.

15) Years and years of this.

16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an
old man’s loneliness.

17) And then my father too disappeared.

18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.

19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was
younger than mine.

20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.

___________
Anna Clarke grew up outside Washington, DC. She teaches art and literacy workshops to at risk youth in San Francisco, and is a freelance documentarian, currently interviewing the work of women environmental artists in the Bay Area. To view her work visit epacprojects.com. She will be attending the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in the fall. The Sister Project is grateful for her curation of this group of poems, our second such offering.

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