"Ghosts" by Kiki Petrosino

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 30, 2017   Ghosts   Kiki Petrosino

After Anne Sexton   Some ghosts are my mothers neither angry nor kind their hair blooming from silk kerchiefs. Not queens, but ghosts who hum down the hall on their curved fins sad as seahorses.   Not all ghosts are mothers. I've counted them as I walk the beach. Some are herons wearing the moonrise like lace. Not lonely, but ghostly. They stalk the low tide pools, flexing their brassy beaks, their eyes.   But that isn't all. Some of my ghosts are planets. Not bright. Not young. Spiraling deep in the dusk of my body as saucers or moons pleased with their belts of colored dust & hailing no others.            Copyright © 2017 Kiki Petrosino. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This poem is a line-by-line response to Anne Sexton's 1962 poem of the same title. In that piece, Sexton contends with the bodied complexities of girl- and womanhood, reinterpreting 'ghostliness' to encompass the aftereffects of violence and trauma. In my poem, the speaker also experiences her own body as haunted or ghostly, but her phantoms are the children she never gives birth to; her ghost-self the mother she never becomes." —Kiki Petrosino   Kiki Petrosino is the author of Witch Wife, forthcoming from Sarabande Books in December. She directs the creative writing program at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and lives in Louisville. Poetry by Petrosino   Witch Wife (Sarabande Books, 2017) "Her Kind" by Anne Sexton "Theories of Time and Space" by Natasha Trethewey "Center of the World" by Safiya Sinclair Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038