Bo-Arts // Woman of the Year (Part 3)
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 3, is the third 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.
totem.
i stand,
a totem-
grain and paint and
an eternal joy that cannot
be weathered or defaced.
*
my core is far
from your cigarette fingers,
your touch,
from your apocalyptic
stare.
(the world used to freeze for us.
i used to believe in an all-consuming flame.)
*
i am beyond
pagan idolatry.
i am stone and wood and flesh and
i am real again.
*
no longer trapped in
junkie dream state,
no longer the grip of
spanish hands on my chest and thigh,
or your ghost
filling up my lungs so full i cannot breathe
without choking down
your whispy dancing feet.
*
i stand
in fields of native sisterhood,
my own offering.
i walk
in roads hardly paved but
lined with farmer’s markets and
saturday morning soul rituals.
i sit
in the company of my own thoughts,
tea brewed,
and remembrances organic.
*
i am not dying.
i am not dying.
*
you are just a man.
Read here for Woman of the Year: Part One and Woman of the Year: Part Two.