The spider essence of woman has visited me. It could be that she is here to stay.
I admire her. erotic, venomous, clever.
Hidden in the dark.
Crafty like a hand.
In dreams, she is the manipulator.
The one who makes graves from silk.
A vulgarity to exterminate
Seduction- Slyness -Intelligence- are these so ugly?
Wrap them in fear to make them so.
Tag: life
The Kind of Love Your Mother Felt
Time will bury girls and boys
paint their minds
then blow
away
I was bright– and you were new
I was a poem yesterday
Now
cut my skin– or kiss my mouth,
The notes I sing are always
gray.—and every time you look at me
My eyes
are nothing much
the bitter kiss
of compromise
stained your lips
and stole your voice
you’re a stranger.
I’m a ghost.
and i can’t reach
through all your noise
I’d float through all our clouds of smoke
—that’s if I felt I had a choice
but
Every morning, I feel older
dark nights crawl,
and
warm days race
–you’re so black and I’m too blue
our bed
is such a lonely place.
Every day we wake up dry
in fields too brown for rain to save
we’ll
–sleep in weeds until we die
yes,
–sleep in weeds until we die
-Angelisa Miranda
The Walls We Are Inside
For the man who doesn’t need me,
I am a million wanting hands growing from stones
too hard
and impenetrable to sprout
anything at all.
Against me, an ocean.
–cold.
–grey.
It is a mirror
unconcerned with the self I want to see
–always
I am facing the wrong direction
and so is he.
Sometimes,
I am an open mouth
wrinkling for lack of moisture and he is the whale’s tail
fanning warm, salty air against my tongue.
It is then, that wet and dry are the same to a wanting body
and survival
is in a difference I refuse to know.
If only I could sink beneath the water
where his eyes are.
Would I know him then?
-Angie Hoover
Art: Goodbye by Michael Harford
That Kind of Girl
That mouth hanging open
-dripping
like a soiled dish rag–
–she is porn
–she is titilation
she is the repulsion that
comes afterward
with green fingernails and wet, dying eyes.
Sweet, cherry nipples
stuck on Tender breasts
She’s here
for you
sweaty–
greasy–
limp with filth.
salty fingers on her tongue
she wakes
alive again but at the bottom
–where hell is
defile her-
Life says its safe to make her stink
to make her cry
She’s made for this.
On a good day
she feels numb
cause
She knows how
To be
A thing with no center
There, but not really.
a rusty red husk
drying
in a shadow
by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse
Artwork by Keith P. Rein & Cassidy Rae Limbach
The Silenced Wound
A scar
is yesterday
It doesn’t stab through lonely bones
or bite at freckled wrists.
It only
sits–
flacid.
— The corpse of a memory
that I have
forgotten.
Callous and benign
in a garden of blooming nerves–
Trying hard to imitate
the rosy shades
of life being felt.
But still-
it does not fit
Still
it does not See
that
it is not the same
and it
can never be—
“The Scar” by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse
Artwork: The Rising Sun by Peter Campbell
Of Empowerment
Being in a gi again.
Tying my belt, again.
The meditation, knelt, eyes closed
As on the precipice of a great plunge.
–
I am changed now :
My skin is not as young,
Not quite as pretty as I was.
My joints not quite as limber.
But my sweat still smells the same.
–
A clenched fist – remembered – is the same.
–
“A fist is a fist is a fist.”
–
Five years ago, when I began, tying my white belt, that’s what they said.
And now, dusting off my green-brown, I hear again
And again:
“A fist
is a fist
is a fist”.
–
I look at my fist.
I remember keeping my nails short.
I remember wearing no makeup with confidence.
I remember
Balance
and
I could defend myself
if I had to.
–
Bowing into this keyhold door,
This is my dojo
my school
my home.
Deep somewhere in the roots beneath the floor boards
and the fibers of the carpet
is engrained my sweat
and my blood
and my tears
And there is magic here
underfoot
Because it is here I first saw
The glimmers of who is my true self.
–
And I miss it
As a tree after a drought might remember its first bloom.
–
A level of introspection unparalleled as
what you do when a punch is coming at you.
–
I miss the intimacy of Kumite
Because to fight in this way is to know someone better
than a lover might know one.
I set my hands on guard,
I look you in the eyes,
and it is essential that I know you.
A strike and block exchanged —
The wing of a crane
or The bite of a snake,
and I know you.
Oh, and I would rake as tigers claws might do.
I flew on wings and “rode the wind”.
My feet they moved as leopards do.
–
“A fist is a fist is a fist.”
–
And over clenched fist is set
an open one.
This means “Peace over Power”
To temper jagged steel
as I might have been.
–
But I’m back now. Things are different,
as I’ve said —
Ephemeral things like
the skin around the eyes.
–
But there are other things that are just the same.
And in these timeless stances,
That’s where I will find myself.
–
Untitled Martial Arts Poem by Vanessa Cate
The Way it Happened
Cold sands
rolling
over dents and dunes
silent as death
and
only my chilly lips between to feel them pass–
At once, light
and stiff- a densely packed strip of shoreline
separating east from west.
spit from swallow
speak from sleep.
I recognize this place.
It is where pale
strands of life
rest
on my nose
exhausted after being pulled
and stretched
It is where fingers sag limp
from grasping the wind
too tightly.
And you cannot help me
because only I am here
with my voice
breaking against that relentless wind
that tells me
I can never know the truth
though it is buried somewhere near
“The Way It Happened” by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse
Artwork by Agnes Cecile
The Gymnast
In the evening,
when her elbows grind into the gravel
beneath whirling toes
and plump, freckled cheeks,
she is alive
in the world with the rest of them.
She is the bringer of motion
of percussion—
of lightness and music–
she
is
everything.
But when the faint moonbeams recede,
she is a hardened lump of throbbing thighs
and raw skin–
stiffened scabs
and sleepy hands wrapped up in sheets
longing for the comfort of
adoring
eyes to tell her that
She Exists.
“The Gymnast” by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse
This piece will be featured in an upcoming stage production called Cat-Fight, which explores the complexities of womanhood!
The Show Tell Project 