creative work

Mud Woman, by R. Bratten Weiss and Joanna Penn Cooper, is available to order from Dancing Girl Press

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Mud-woman

 

Some days I am a rib, curved like a boomerang,

the kind of thing that keeps on coming back,

but other days I am a made of clay, mud-woman,

stalking away on clods of feet, graceless.

 

Stalking away, before anyone can blow

breath in me and make me what I’m not,

fill me with some unwanted wind, that I’d then

be expected to carry around like some stupid bowl.

 

No one wants the mud-woman to stalk back to them,

anyway. I leave footprints on tiles, smear my fingers

down walls, sign my name with myself. Try to embrace me.

I’ll fill your mouth with mud, as old as earth.

 

So yes, god made me, but no one will believe that,

since I’m not the pure white thing, the dead thing,

they hoped for. Something to be wrapped in white sheets,

to ripple in the wind from that breath I keep evading....

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