Mary Burk didn’t have much on top so she had to work her booty. Fourteen years old and still no period. Her mom told her breasts wouldn’t really develop until that happened and in the meantime, she should make do with what she had.
“When Aunt Flow is late,” her mother told her, “It means you’ll be taller, and thinner than your classmates, and then those boobs will come on like gangbusters and if they don’t there’s always plastic surgery.”
Mary wondered if any of her friends had mother-daughter talks like the ones she had with Ellen. That’s what Mom wanted Mary to call her now.
“So we can be girlfriends, right?” Ellen said. “Now let me show you how to move that ass.”…
...continue reading
He reached down and picked up the locket. It had been smashed into the mud by a passerby. There was no chain. The eyelet at the top of the locket was bent open, but the locket was still clasped shut. The day was warm and bright around him, the street bustling with movement and sound. On a telephone line above, a collied blackbird told the story, and no one listened, not even the man holding the locket. His heart felt lighter than it had a moment before.
He said of her, “She is smart—really smart.” His closest friend, a woman with short-cropped curly brown hair and tight lines radiating from the corners of her mouth, thought that he meant She is not beautiful. He meant that her nightstand overflowed with books, that she would rise suddenly in the small hours of the night and trace her fingertips along the spines lining her bookshelf to retrieve an exact quotation, that her intelligence rattled in him an ego he hadn’t realized was there.…
...continue reading
Sarah-Jean Krahn is the Managing Editor of feminist writing journal S/tick and holds an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her writing appears in various anthologies and journals, including Berkeley Poetry Review and Feminist Studies, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart.
Please describe your website and your duties as editor/writer.
I like to think of S/tick as an ever-growing creative collaborative community of feminist writers and artists. In keeping with our mission to publish things that are difficult to say or hard to find a home for, we strive to share as many feminist voices as possible by currently publishing 50%+ of the submissions we receive. To some degree, S/tick snags the poems and stories that have been relegated to an eternal time-out, castigated as too complain-y, too feminist, too real.…
...continue reading
Emptiness eats at the heart, more surely than time itself,
yet some days we are blessed with company
enabling us to see just beyond the emaciated self.
Though the day ahead seems barren, a friend
will sometimes bring along all the light you lack to coast
above the dour grey slates and chimney pots.
So we make our soup of fresh tomatoes and basil
in the garret kitchen, and the knots in the stomach
loosen their grip as we make ready to eat and talk.
No time now for last year’s man, or any lost inventory
of sights not seen, things not done, time wasted
in procrastination, or dreams hardly begun.
And though we are still both dreamers of sorts,
we stand beside immense facades, telling the other
there is no need for touch, or sex, or love.…
...continue reading
Beneath the winter Hartlepool sky, I coiled myself into a scratchy wool blanket Mum made for me thirty-nine years ago. The bottle of cider pressed cold against my fingers.
–Get out the road, my neighbor Horace shouted. Ya gonna get run over.
–Let ’em, I said. Got half a mind to die.
–
I babysat Horace’s dog once. An Alsatian named Bran. Horace told me he was going to see his kid in Halifax for the weekend.
–Don’t forget to feed Bran, he said. You usually forget to feed yourself.
–Sod off. I can take care of myself.
–…
...continue reading
Of course I’ve noticed
how you’re drawn to
what you call my
wounds symmetry
doesn’t beckon the eye
no— disruption &
disorder a lopsidedness
reminding you you are
dreaming the rest of
your life asleep in
expectation until a
patch of bark shows
you a swirl & a
swelling about a gap
that once was
wholeness my
surface wavy like old
glass the slow
assemblage of cells
moving in to cover &
protect rippling up the
roughened river new
growth a whirlpool
whose center narrows
by season & I know
you want nothing
more than to stick your
hand into this soft-
edged opening to feel
reparation what we
trees are go ahead
touch me & awaken
to doubt
– Mary Buchinger…
...continue reading
Faltu: Meaningless. Without a purpose. Without any promise. Imposed upon. Unwanted. Something that can be got rid of easily. Useless.
Thwackk! The blow was unexpected. Swift. Unnecessary. The blue and white carpet, with its odd, congested geometric pattern, rises up to meet me. I realize with a pang! that they are not flowers. They are just straight lines that criss-cross each other. Why didn’t I notice this before? Why did I think they were flowers? I am suddenly mortified, and then I am flying across the room. My body is a hot spring and a cold glacier melting into each other. The searing pain of contact. Black. Blue. Purple. Nights and days that cross each other off. The pain comes and goes. It travels up.…
...continue reading