Bo-Arts // Woman of the Year (Part 2)
Bo-Arts is a bi-weekly art/literature initiative.Twice a month, Boshemia will share creative writing and visual art submissions from our readers and folks who identify as feminist to give a larger audience to emerging creatives. Our goal is to provide a platform for feminist artists to share and discuss their work.
This issue of Bo-Arts, Woman of the Year: Part 2, is the second installment of the poem-and-photography collaborations brought to you by a duo from Frederick, Maryland, USA. Anna See-Jachowski is a poet and feminist thrilled to be working with Boshemia. Anna, her partner Matt, and their four cats live in Frederick. Emily Jessee is a young feminist creative who uses platforms like photography to portray the harshness and vulnerability of the world around her.
Artist’s Statement – from Anna
These poems are part of a series I plan to self-publish this year, titled Woman of the Year. Each poem represents a period in a young artist’s life in which they find love, a muse, and desperately seek the meaning of that experience. The five poems are a taste of what the series will offer, and explore the deadly combination of desperation and anger felt when a lover leaves; the lovely vulnerability of falling asleep around people you love; the ritual of hedonism in summertime; and finally, the artist’s banishment of her muse for the sake of her own recovery from trauma.
Read more of Anna's artist's statement here.
TO SLEEP
turning,
i can hear your
faintness.
not a word
you say
permeates
that thick, fuzzy orb
which surrounds
in unparalleled softness.
impermeable,
even to your stories,
it encircles me,
and all the space around,
which i claim with
subtle, slumbery grasps
at nothing.
tossing,
now i can’t
find the gap
between where a half-remembered dream
left off,
and where your voice,
like a lighthouse or my father’s,
began.
you’re telling tales of
indian childhoods and
painful bathroom floor mornings.
i can smell the
sunlight, but
i feel luna
on the breath of
your whiskey speech
and his (our lad’s)
smokey, awe-laden confirmations
of a mystic, shared thought.
the wine drew me in
a few nights later, but
this time,
i didn’t move an inch.
rather, i rolled myself
up in your laundry
on the loveseat,
and when you both
carried me to bed,
(my sweet boys)
you each took a
moment
to watch.
i like to think
that, silently,
you didn’t just
gaze like men do.
instead you kissed me with
pupils,
(your babe)
and you each
fell a little
harder.
and also not at all.
*