Weaver’s poems take a look at love, and it’s not quite what you might expect. Even in the sweetest moments, there’s an awareness of mortality, and sometimes the potential for violence. Your lips were garrote taut and rigid wire, says her speaker in the title poem. We were enamored of this micro chap from the moment we saw the title, with its longing, edged wit, and despair too. We present it to you with all of the honest-sweet and tarnished remembering. This is Hilda’s first chapbook. (Porkbelly Press, 2015) // available in our shop
Excerpt from the title poem The Autobiography of a Love Not Mine
The Autobiography of a Love Not Mine
I
First I saw you
in a long and elegant black coat
but at the evening’s end
we went each to a squishy space,
discovered not a thing of you
nor you of me.
II
Oxymoron: tranquil Halloween,
and when you said, “I know
who I would kiss, who I would gift
this crazy hat,” you kissed
my mouth. An unexpected soft.
I’d never felt a woman’s breath
that way before.
III
I wanted you to say
you wanted me.
Instead you said, “I love
you.” Love is Farsi
to a German whore,
Hindi in the spread of legs
to men, Sanskrit no one knows
the sound of – only signs.
IV
It started then
plunged in the slag heap
of absolute engrossed;
involved, entwined,
beyond the sanity
of bluebirds in the snow.
V
The men you kept
kept wanting you, the prophetess
of sexual endorsement
bewitched by all the pumped up parts
bountiful, enlarged
only for their ogled worship gratified.
When you were drunk
it didn’t matter much.
VI
I watched over you
lying in the sheets
garbaged up by Glenfiddich,
but you could humble me;
I was in the wrong
a confrontation gone awry
by witness, by arrest.
About the Poet
Although Hilda has written poetry off and on over the course of her life, she reports not taking it seriously until about four years ago. At that time she started as an “over-65” scholar at Northern Kentucky University learning more about refining her “tendency to be wordy.” She was graduated from Miami University (Ohio with a BA in English, and later got a Master’s Degree in Clinical and Applied Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. She worked over 30 years as a psychotherapist and Marriage and Family Therapist as well as an addictions counselor. Retired now for several years, she writes poetry and finds herself otherwise spectacularly lazy.
Cover & Cover Artist
Cover art: “Hearth—Settlement Place” (acrylic/mixed media painting, 12 x 12 inches) by Maralena Howard.
The cover is produced digitally (inkjet!) on Epson matte paper. The micro chapbooks is handbound & each is trimmed by hand. The micro chap itself measures about 6.25 x 5 inches.
Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Maralena Howard is a painter, mixed media artist and writer. Her focuses on abstract and minimalist subjects are prominent. Of her work, Maralena states, “I celebrate the complex nature of detailed simplicity. Capture. Repossess. Release. In each piece, there is liberation.”
Maralena’s work has been published, exhibited in galleries, special venues, hospitals, municipal offices, and businesses. Her paintings are collected thoughout Michigan, the United States and internationally. | www.maralena.com
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