by C.R. Resetarits
Turning Away from Despair
Marxism will give health to the sick, Artist Frida Kahlo
I am not crying anymore, Elisabeth Horan
Turkey lovers to the North be silent. Still your murmurs, your gaze. They do not
heal me. Nor do they cure the cervical cancer I did not know I had. Or the
penniless grief of being without comfort when life takes back what it gives.
Instead of your crutch, I lean on the eastern slopes of Marxism and offer to sell
my beauty – my hair, my teeth – to keep the linked chain of my woman’s spine
gliding when I move.
This is how we with womb make love to ourselves. Steel ourselves against the
cold metal rod shoved into our core when we give birth to fetuses who cannot
breathe. Unnamed, we leave them behind in hospitals, hotels, the hopelessness of
torn dress pockets that will not mend.
I reach for dreams of revolution, of miracles, of faith that can reform my body;
our bodies as women mutilated by what we cannot deliver.
Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including BluePepper, Pandemic Puzzle Poems, Postcard Poems and Prose, Potato Soup Journal, Timeworn Literary Journal, Tiny Thimble Magazine, and other publications. She facilitates creative writing workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area and is also a mixed-media assemblage artist.
C. R. Resetarits is a writer and collagist. Her collage works have appeared in the pages and on the covers of dozens of magazines, as well as several poetry collections. New collages now on the covers of Shooter Magazine (UK) and Cowboy Jamboree (US). She lives in Faulkner-riddled Oxford, MS.