Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.
If I
could tell
the truth
about
what happens
to the marks
you leave
but won't stay
long enough
to watch
change
shape
change color
finally
fade
*
December
makes me
want
to terminate
every
unreliable
connection
*
The marks
turn into
syllables
I
stay
swollen
wait
for
words
breed
heirs
you'll
never
know
*
from your
whip
came
something
so far
from
decorous
*
I shudder
to recall
just how
I was
conceived
Barbara Claire Freeman is a poet and author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction. She teaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
We rely on readers to keep our pages free and open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination: become a supporting reader today.
The best writing on ideas, politics, and culture delivered straight to your inbox.
For Robert Jay Lifton, treating veterans’ trauma was an antiwar tool. How did PTSD, the diagnosis he helped create, come to accommodate state violence?
“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”
The Israel-India worker deal resembles British indenture.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster—with work by Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Solmaz Sharif, Juan Felipe Herrera, and much more.
Newsletter subscribers get our latest essays, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content (plus 10% off our entire store).
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.