ASPASIOLOGY
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact

Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes in Response to Elizabeth Treadwell

piecemeal work / scraps stitched like maps

TWO POEMS IN RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH TREADWELL’S  POEM, PASSERINE
​

Gathering That Feels Like Stalking
 


Privateers own the water
all around
 
This is fairy sails vs pirate ship
Our daughters' crafts christened
in radical love
 
It is fantasy to think
they can overtake them
& yet they do
 
& girls everywhere glinted all day
like swords
bright in victories
piecemeal work
scraps stitched likes maps
one by one
 
It’s so hard to get away from beauty
The invisible dresses
 
They are not lilies
and their fragrance is not their emission.  
A projection heavy as ingots.
 
Girls both vincible and convincible &
who sold it to them as a shield?
  
You ask me for my central argument.
You want me to stop this
stitching & gathering that feels like stalking.
You say
when you say this
I say that, and when you say that, I say this
 
Yes. Yes to all of it.
 
It’s not simple. I won’t make it simple for you
I won’t build you the crux to nail us to
 
If I caught one, brushed a tendril
I’d let go
let her be
 
awash in personal weather
sunbeams, deep shade & storms---
 
A system that knows it’s free
& open
 


 
To and come back to
 
 
very lovely folded petal by petal          words for her that she repeats
 
if the mirror absorbs a little                  pulled through the thicket or soft folds
 
shine on fur its own color                     as if eyes have no borders

we speak & & are touching                 pardon the hands rind and pith
 
 

Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes lives with her husband and daughter in San Francisco. She works with children with neurological differences. Nicole has published writing in New American Writing, Counterpath, Fourteen Hills, Transfer Magazine, Poem Flow, Poems de Unidas, and Secret Mint and The BOAS anthology. ​

Follow on Twitter or email Gertrude And:


Email

aspasiology@gmail.com
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact