ISSUE 11

Candice Kelsey 

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Menopause: A Cento

 

lines from the female U.S. Poets Laureate

 

She has a secret humble wish [i]

to practice yoga, take piano lessons,

rewrite her drama rife with lust and pride. [ii]

 

Try it: all you’ll get is pieces—the sun

emerging from behind the mountain ridge,

smoke coming off the ice on a thawing lake. [iii]

 

I was a thought, a dream, a fish, a wing 

And then a human being 

When I emerged from my mother's river. [iv] 

 

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time   

not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet   

it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly. [v]

 

I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,

listen for passing cars. All day we watch

for the mail, some news from a distant place. [vi]

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Then animals long believed gone crept down

From trees. We took new stock of one another.

We wept to be reminded of such color. [vii]

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All these great barns out here in the outskirts,

black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. [viii]

 

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[i] “The Ugly Old Lady,” Josephine Jacobsen

[ii] “The Revisionist Dream,” Maxine Kumin

[iii] “Voiceover,” Rita Dove

[iv] “Granddaughters,” Joy Harjo

[v] “Vita Nova,” Louise Gluck

[vi] “Housekeeping,” Natasha Trethewey

[vii] “An Old Story,” Tracy K. Smith

[viii] “What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use,” Ada Limón

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