Louise Glück, from Averno
“Sometimes you leave your hair at the bus station
& get on the bus & as your face falls asleep against the window
you realize it is all your body now, everything between you
& the pieces you lost once,”
Aracelis Girmay, from Kingdom Animalia; “Portrait of the Woman As a Skein”
Marie Howe, from Magdalene: Poems; “The Girl at 3″
“She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.”
Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless
“Many girls lock themselves up, / become pantries, closets. / Some, like trees, grow bark, / and others, like rivers, / burble into dimpled pools.”
Eli Mandel, from “Rapunzel (Girl in a Tower)“
“Sometimes I forget. I become a volatile spirit / a butterfly out of its wings, a blooming flower / in decay. I fall in love with ghosts and cry / when they flesh out,”
Mahtem Shiferraw, from Fuschia; “Being a Woman”
Aracelis Girmay, from “Portrait of the Woman as a Skein”
“Not every girl survives the forest. / Sometimes she becomes it.”
Catherine Garbinsky, from “The Princess & the Thorns,” Even Curses End
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“I was something else, not a girl, not a wolf, something blank-eyed, tired,”
Catherynne M. Valente, from The Bread We Eat in Dreams
“Shame fuses to silence letting the night maraud, killing bit by useless hope of not being this girl I was. Am. She is.”
Eimear McBride, from The Lesser Bohemians
“When I was a girl / and you were a girl / we were floral / and ungiveable. Squash / blossom. Bleeding / Hearts in the sideyard. / Vine, albino root. / Petals open only in the moonlight.”
Emily O'Neill, “Wedding Soup,” from Pelican
“Glory be to the girl who goes back for her body.”
Dominique Christina, from Star Gazer
“Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you’ll be—come, and frighten the girl you used to be.”
Alejandra Pizarnik, from Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (tr. Yvette Siegert), “Paths of the Mirror”
“—if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl and not yet a woman— / but I don’t think there was a day like that for me. / When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit, or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street, / she wears a furtive look— and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now / she would never come into my arms without believing that I wanted something.”
Marie Howe, from What the Living Do: Poems; “The Girl”
“‘How strange it is to long for one’s self!’ she said; ‘and yet I often, so often, long for myself as a young girl. I love her as one whom I had been very close to and shared life and happiness and everything with, and then had lost while I stood helpless.’”
Jens Peter Jacobsen, from Niels Lyhne
Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses; “Blueberries”
“Your bare feet became a woman’s feet, always saying two things at once.”
Louise Glück, from Descending Figure
“And I must choose. War before me, and behind, a woman I do not know, the woman I could have been, a human woman, whole and hot.”
Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless
Louise Glück, from “The Myth of Innocence”
“Beware your face, / your limbs, your walk: / Gods see these / as invitations. / Beware of swans. / They may lift you / but you will fall. / Beware of children / hatched from eggs, / unfledged and beautiful: / they will burn / cities to the ground. / Don’t be seduced by the gods, / my daughter. / Though you break / into song beneath them / you will remain broken.”
Jeannine Hall Gailey, from Becoming the Villainess; “Leda’s Mother Warns Her”
“What could I have grown up to be? What kind of human woman, what kind of simple, happy thing? If I had never been broken on a bird’s wing. If I had never seen the world naked. I want to be myself again… I want to stop knowing everything I know.”
Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless
“But I don’t really like what I know; I don’t really care for wisdom and experience. I would rather believe, and beat out my brains, and believe some more. I do not like this safe well-armed woman I have become. The loud bleating disheveled starry reckless failed girl was a better person.”
Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters
“a child with seafoam eyes / and dusky skin might cry, there / goes a girl with seven thousand years / at the hollow of her throat,”
Amal El-Mohtar, from ‘Song for an Ancient City’
“I say “her,” because I don’t recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember.”
Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin
“There were always in me two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume One, 1931-1934
“Come, let me suffer! That is worth more than viewing injustice with a serene countenance, as Shakespeare says. When I have drained my cup of bitterness, I shall feel better. I am a woman, I have affections, sympathies, and wrath.”
George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert
“Slapped the man’s face, then slapped it again, / broke the plate, broke the glass, pushed the cat / from the couch with my feet. Let the baby / cry too long, then shook him, / let the man walk, let the girl down, / wouldn’t talk, then talked too long, / lied when there was no need / and stole what others had, and never / told the secret that kept me apart from them. / Years holding on to a rope / that wasn’t there, always sorry / and righteous and wrong. Who would / follow that young woman down the narrow hallway? / Who would call her name until she turns?”
Marie Howe, “What I Did Wrong”
“She is a woman stranded at doorways and passivity is killing her. There is only one thing she can do. Make noise.”
Anne Carson, in her Introduction to Elektra
Audre Lorde, from The Black Unicorn: Poems
“Part of me died here / so another could go on.”
Marty McConnell, from “When They Say You Can’t Go Home Again, What They Mean Is You Were Never There”
“see, you will rise. / and are you less of a woman for this? / no / what is woman? / woman is this—enduring. / listen girl, you will survive this—you will. / but what fool said you had to do it silently? / here is a tip—scream”
Salma Deera, Letters From Medea, “medea gives advice to a young girl with a broken heart”
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